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