SITE AIMS TO BE THE LAST WORD ON LINGO

Wordnik.com, a new website that seeks to corral the vast and ever-changing English lexicon, included this snarky Twitter post with its entry on “muffin top”:

This girl that works @ Vanity needs 2 learn what “muffin top” means.

Aside from the unfortunate target of “Miss_Binky” and her Twitter-mates, some of us also may want to learn the definition. Maybe our kids used the term, or we heard it whispered by that younger couple on the next blanket at the beach.

Wordnik, launched last week, is still seeking registered users’ definitions for “muffin top,” but from the tone of the Twitter post, it can’t be flattering. Below the Twitter entries are photographs. The first one shows a woman with her belly exposed and a roll of fat slumping over her tightly cinched skirt. Below that is a picture of an actual muffin with the characteristic mushroomed top.

Ahhh – muffin top.

Wordnik.com’s goal is to give each word a complete floor show, with definitions, sentences and online messages that include the word, photographs, frequency-of-use charts, etymology, related words and audio pronunciations.

Packaging the entire English vocabulary in such detail is a huge goal, Wordnik editorial director Grant Barrett acknowledged in an e-mail, “but we’ve collected 1.7 million so far, and there are still many more to come.”

Whoa, there! 1.7 million? The Oxford English Dictionary contains about 600,000 words. Global Language Monitor, which describes itself as an Internet media analytics company, says there are just over 1 million English words, a mark breached June 10 at 10:22 a.m, according to GLM’s website, www.languagemonitor.com.The difference is in the definition of “word.”

The Oxford English Dictionary collects many words from readers throughout the world, who highlight new words in books, magazines and other materials and submit them to a central staff. At GLM, a word becomes official when the staff collects 25,000 citations from throughout the English-speaking world, according to the organization’s website.

In contrast, Wordnik.com has no such benchmark or long, deliberative process. The staff says they want to post words quickly so people can comment and add their own definitions and usage examples.

“Wordnik wants to be a place for all the words, and everything known about them,” according to the website. “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!”

Registered users on the free site can submit new words, definitions, notes about a word and pronunciations. The site also uses definitions from such standard sources as The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language and “Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus.

The Wordnik team includes co-founder Erin McKean, former editor in chief for American Dictionaries at Oxford University Press and the author of several books about words, including “Weird and Wonderful Words.”

“At Wordnik,” McKean wrote in an e-mail, “we consider something a word when it is used as a word, no matter how infrequently. If we can prove a word exists, it’s a word!”