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 ¹. 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 Mastodon feed provided the solution. If I post a toot which begins "#wotd" then the next word in the tweet becomes the word of the day here for a while before 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.

They used to have an RSS feed for it but that's gone now so I'm reduced to "screen scaping" to pick up the word.(footnote added 2013-12-11)
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 2010.

Wiblog:
Notes on a trip to Germany

I'm just back from a trip to Munich using trains and ferries by way of Newcastle and Amsterdam. For the highlights visit the Mastodon account @pauls_trips@mas.to where I posted multiple times a day. This post is largely to get stuff I learned into search engines. read more ...