Wordnik.com Launches Smarter Online Thesaurus

New Way of Viewing Words in Context Helps Students, Writers

SAN MATEO, California, August 16, 2010 - Wordnik, the online dictionary and language resource, today launched a
new, smarter online thesaurus that shows related words in context to help
writers find the right word quickly and accurately.

Traditional online thesauruses show related words, but ignore context.
They don't tell you that people like brownies that are moist but not brownies
that are damp, or that it doesn't make sense to moisten your enthusiasm.

Wordnik's thesaurus lets you see words in real-world sentences drawn from
a vast and constantly updated collection of texts. Whether a word was coined
by Shakespeare or Sarah Palin, you'll find high-quality sentences to help you
understand how that word is used by others, and how to use it correctly
yourself.

Wordnik is also the first online thesaurus to let you compare words
side-by-side. Want a more nuanced understanding of 'vacant' vs. 'void'?
Viewing their definitions and example sentences next to each other reveals
that they're not interchangeable: 'vacant' is often applied to jobs and
properties, and 'void' often refers metaphorically to emptiness. The ability
to see those nuances, missing from traditional online thesauruses and
dictionaries, makes Wordnik's thesaurus unique.

The Wordnik.com thesaurus is available now at
www.wordnik.com/thesaurus. Screenshots can be viewed at
www.wordnik.com/preview/thesaurus. Wordnik CEO Erin McKean is
available for interviews.

ABOUT WORDNIK

Wordnik's mission is to gather as much information as possible about as
many words as possible and to share that information with as many people as
possible. The company has information for more than nine million English
words. Founded by Erin McKean, the former editor in chief of The New Oxford
American Dictionary, Wordnik's team includes experts in search engine
architecture, social networking, computational linguistics and library
science. For more information visit www.wordnik.com, follow us on
Twitter (twitter.com/Wordnik), or email feedback@wordnik.com.

    Contact:
    John McGrath
    +1-207-332-8709
    john@wordnik.com

John McGrath of Wordnik, +1-207-332-8709, john at wordnik.com