Instructify

November 29, 2010

I have one of those humongous Oxford Unabridged Dictionaries at home, but I really couldn’t tell you where it is right now. I don’t ever open it anymore thanks to Wordnik, and my back is probably better off for it not lifting that 20-pound tome.

Wordnik gets me the information I need much faster, as well as providing an experience that a paper dictionary can’t match. When you look up a word on Wordnik, it doesn’t merely give you a definition with an audio playback. You get all the word’s possible definitions, examples of the word in publication, current usage of the word on twitter, synonyms, etymology, and even its Scrabble score. It may seem like information overload, but Wordnik puts all this data on one page so I don’t have to click far or travel to other sites to get any tangential information I might want.

One thing I feel Wordnik needs to be address is that, under the section “Elsewhere on the Web” where you can see the definitions the other sites use, Urban Dictionary is one of the links. Urban Dictionary is not appropriate for students (to say the least), and as such, Wordnik might be a good tool for a teacher to use, but probably not a good choice to give to students and let them run with it.

Wordnik