Do you use wordnik? If so, do you find this to be a useful resource?
I’d never heard of it, but looks to be very useful. I like seeing definitions, etymologies, and thesaurus results all on one page.
I didn’t know about it until now. Thanks! I’ll use it.
For simple definitions that a developing writer might want to see, it’s fine–just as good as looking up several online dictionaries separately. But the examples can fail miserably. Try putting in the word don, and see what examples you get.
Similarly, for an English learner, it lacks information that a good dictionary should have, especially without reliable examples. If you look up the verb run off, for example, it doesn’t indicate which meanings are transitive or intransitive (or both), and it doesn’t indicate the respective prepositions which collocate with the different meanings. So while it has the various definitions for run off, it wouldn’t help an English learner to employ the verb correctly in these different ways:
I’m sorry your dog ran off.
I’m sorry they ran off your dog.
Henry ran off with the mayor’s daughter.
His house ran off of solar power.
We ran off some copies of the contract before the meeting.
We ran some copies of the contract off before the meeting.(seperability)
guizot. Would you submit your analysis to wordnik to make it better? Just asking…
I had never heard of it, but I tried it and was not impressed. I entered “cleave” and the two distinct meanings (with distinct etymologies and distinct conjugations–one strong and one weak) were thoroughly mixed without serious explanation that they were separate words that happened to be homonyms as well as homographs.
Looks like it could be handy but easily confused.
I tried “mete”. It found it, but under “Examples” it found two versions of God ordering “to ete no mete”.
Bizarre. How it managed to take the ‘ete’ from the subject and substitute it for ‘eat’, I don’t want to know.
Yeah, I know I typed in ‘ete’ where you thought I should have typed ‘eat’, but you don’t need to do this.