Word of the Day
I like words and I'd been thinking for a while that when I re-did my web pages I'd like to have a word of the day displayed. But it's not every day that I come across a word that I like and I don't want it to get stale.
So what to do?
The solution came after watching the co-founder and CEO of Wordnik Erin McKean speak at TED on redefining the dictionary.
Wordnik has a word of the day and, more importantly for me, an RSS feed for it1. So now I had a new word of the day available every day if I didn't have one of my own2.
Which lead me on to the second part of the solution: how to add my own word of the day when I had one. And there my Twitter feed provided the solution. I was already using it to provide the "Current status" you'll see on my pages. Now if I post a tweet which begins "#wotd" then, rather than the tweet appearing as my new status, the next word in the tweet becomes the word of the day here for the next 24 hours after which it goes back to tracking Wordnik.
The bottom line then is that sometimes the word of the day will have been chosen by me, sometimes by Wordnik. Either way clicking on it will take you to Worknik's page for that word.
I hope, like me, you find some pleasure in the words you discover this way.
- Although it's currently broken, so I'm reduced to "screen scaping" to pick up the word at the moment. And yes, I did email them about this some weeks ago. (footnote added 2010-12-01)
- It's perhaps worth mentioning (as I've had complaints) that both Wordnik and I take a fairly loose interpretation of the word "word" - so sometimes you'll see multi-word "words", e.g. ex nihilo which was my word of the day on 30th January 2020.