Wordnik, a nonprofit organization, is an online English dictionary and language resource that provides dictionary and thesaurus content.^[1] Some of the content is based on print dictionaries such as the Century Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary, WordNet, and GCIDE. Wordnik has collected a corpus of billions of words which it uses to display example sentences, allowing it to provide information on a much larger set of words than a typical dictionary. Wordnik uses as many real examples as possible when defining a word.^[1][2]

Wiktionary, the free open dictionary project, is one major source of words and citations used by Wordnik.

Wordnik.com was launched as a closed beta in February 2008^[3][4] and opened to all in June 2009.^[5] Cofounders of the site are CEO Erin McKean, editorial director Grant Barrett, and chief computational lexicographer Orion Montoya, and head of engineering Anthony Tam.^[6][4] McKean, Barrett, and Montoya all formerly worked in the US Dictionaries Department of Oxford University Press.^[4][7][8] The startup company was originally headquartered in San Mateo, California.^[9]

In September 2009, Wordnik purchased the social language site Wordie.org. All Wordie.org accounts and data were subsequently transferred to Wordnik.^[10]

Wordnik's material is sourced from the Internet by automatic programs. It then shows readers the information regarding a certain word without any editorial influence.^[2] Wordnik does not allow for user-contributed definitions, but seems to assert that it may allow for this in the future.^[1]

In January 2011, McKean relaunched the company as Reverb Technologies, Inc. in Palo Alto, with Wordnik co-founder Anthony Tam.^{[11][12][13][14]}

Under the name Reverb, they kept operating Wordnik.com, but also expanded its technology to other services and products, including "Reverb for Publishers" which was a plug-in for blogs to find related articles.^[11]

The company began a Kickstarter campaign in 2015 with the purpose of finding and adding a million words to Wordnik that had not yet been included in major English dictionaries.^[15]

As of 14 January 2012^[update], Wordnik Zeitgeist reports that,^[16]

Wordnik is billions of words, 971,860,842 example sentences, 6,925,967 unique words, 231,628 comments, 178,718 tags, 121,432 pronunciations, 77,736 favorites and 1,022,649 words in 32,703 lists created by 81,138 Wordniks.

— Wordnik Zeitgeist

• Erin McKean