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This is The Rundown, I'm Hari Sreenivasan, we're talking about words today.
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Joining me now is lexicographer Erin McKean, she's the CEO and founder of Wordnik.com.
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Thanks for joining us.
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You're very welcome. Thank you.
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Google recently launched a kind of a website or a database if you will, along with some folks at Harvard—
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the NGRAM, which allows people to search for words through hundreds and hundreds and thousands
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of books and periodicals and so forth that have gone back for decades.
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What did you do when you first heard about it?
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We were very excited when we realized that google was releasing the NGRAM data under a very open license
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because it means that lots of people can take that data and try and do cool things with it.
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And of course at Wordnik, we're all about trying to do cool things with words.
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And so the data is based on something like 5 percent of the Google Books corpus,
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which is not a lot, but it's a lot of words.
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What does it teach you about the English language to have access to the occurrence of words over time?
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Right now, you can think of the kind of science behind the NGRAM viewer as like what,
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say, early antibiotics were like.
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They aren't very targeted, so you can't really tell the difference between, say,
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the word "pretty" when it means "good looking"
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versus the word "pretty" when it's in a construction, like, "That was a pretty neat thing."
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Are we using more new words now? Is the rate of the English language's growth increasing?
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Right now we can measure it better than we ever have been able to do before, so in the paper that the
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researchers from Google and from Harvard published in Science,
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they were talking about that they notice more new words appearing over time.
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And also something that I was very happy to have people from Google and Harvard backing me up on
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that they estimated that 52 percent of the words that they looked at
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were not in the dictionaries that they checked.
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How is that even possible?
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Well, there are lots and lots of words that happen just once, nonce words,
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that if you are making a print dictionary you just don't have room to put them in.
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And for someone who hasn't been to Wordnik, what's the difference between
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Wordnik and going to one of the other online dictionaries?
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So Wordnik has about six times as many words as most of the other online dictionaries.
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So we show you as much information as we can about as many words as we can.
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So if there's a traditional dictionary definition, we'll show you that.
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But if we only have three really good sentences from say
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the Wall Street Journal, or Forbes, or the Huffington Post, we'll show you that
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and say, "Hey, real journalists are using this word. You can take their sentences as a model."
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Since it is getting kind of close to the new year,
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what are some of the top words of 2010 or 2011 that you're seeing?
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It's interesting, people always want to have the top words of the year, but usually
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words kind of incubate underground like seeds for a while until they pop up into popular consciousness.
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A couple of words that I've been really interested in lately are all kinda
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negative technology consequences words, like geoslavery.
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And what does geoslavery mean?
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So geoslavery is the idea that with all the GPS functionality and tracking on people's cellphones
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that abusive partners and spouses can use that data to keep tighter tabs on their partners
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With the idea that they're really trying to enforce behavior limits.
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What else is popping up like a seed?
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I really like the word aftercrimes, which is made by analogy to afershocks.
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So it's little crimes that pop up in an area after a major crime has occurred there.
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So what's the end goal for Wordnik? Does it become the dictionary of choice for everyone?
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We're trying to map the whole English language.
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What we'd really like to be is GPS for words
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and show you as much information about as many words as possible.
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All right, Erin McKean CEO and founder of Wordnik, lexicographer.
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Thanks for joining us and happy wording.
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Thanks so much.
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I'm Hari Sreenivasan, this is The Rundown. Stay with us.
