Wordnik is “a dictionary aiming to collect all the words in the English language: 1.7 million so far! Examples, pronunciations, user notes, and more”.

“Wordnik is a place for all the words, and everything known about them”.

Wordnik‘s  goal is “to show you as much information as possible, as fast as we can find it, for every word in English, and to give you a place where you can make your own opinions about words known.

You can follow Wordnik on Twitter too: twitter/wordnik. Through Twitter, I have just learnt that, on Wordnik, you can hear the sounds of onomatopoetic words, as well as their pronunciations!

Traditional dictionaries make you wait until they’ve found what they consider to be “enough” information about a word before they will show it to you. Wordnik knows you don’t want to wait—if you’re interested in a word, we’re interested too!

By “information, they don’t just mean “traditional definitions (although they have plenty of those too!)

This information could be:

• An example sentence—”we have tons of examples and gobs of other data for most words. But even if we’ve only found one sentence, we’ll show it to you. And we’ll show you where it came from”.
• Related words: “not just synonyms and antonyms, but words that are used in the same contexts. Cheeseburger, milkshake, and doughnut aren’t synonyms, but they show up in the same kinds of sentences”.
• Images tagged by Flickr: “want to know what a pout looks like? We’ll show you”.
• Statistics: “how rare is tintinnabulation? Well, we think you’ll see it only about once a year. Smile? You might see that word many times, every day”.
• An audio pronunciation—and you can record your own!
• “Something YOU tell us! Use the “Comments” and “Contribute” links to tell Wordnik something—anything—about a word”.

A typical “list of the day”: bedaphors, words related to sleep, such as sweven, stertorous, ahypnia, recubation, sloomy, etc.

Go and explore Wordnik… you could be there for some time!