Show HN: WordsForThat.com - A new site that's like a reverse urban dictionary

http://www.wordsforthat.com

by seventytwo • 13 years ago

151 31 13 years ago

batiudrami• 13 years ago

This is actually pretty fun. More like a game than a dictionary, though.

Neat site, but not sure how well the content scales. Pithy rhymes and alliteration get stale pretty quickly. Obviously, the beauty of Urban Dictionary is the ability to lookup words that are actually in use. So it has practical utility outside of its obvious entertainment value. Not sure this works the same way.

seventytwo2• 13 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! We're just starting out and this is an excellent stress test for us... Any other concerns or comments are greatly appreciated.

Alliteration and portmanteau are a given for something like this. However, we designed the site to be able to handle submissions like foreign words, obscure English words, and also completely made-up words. Additionally, the scenarios don't necessarily need to be word-less lexical gaps! They can describe something which may already have a bunch of words associated with it - the WFT platform being used, in that case, as a voting (or popularity contest) system for the existing slang. Last, to counter the practicality of UD, WFT has the ability to search based on the scenarios and keywords. Once our databases are bit more filled out, users will be able to come to the site to search for a situation and see the most commonly-used (or most clever or whatever) words for that.

I do agree, however, that it may take some effort and some tweaking of the site to encourage something more than the lowest-common-denominator submissions from the general public. Then again, there's a trade-off there between improving content and alienating potential users.

Thanks for the feedback though! Lots to think about!

itsameta4• 13 years ago

Please ban the word "totally" from definition examples.

CrankyPants3• 13 years ago

I'm not sure enabling hipsters to sound like they're scripted by the writers of Juno is a good thing.

CrankyPants3• 13 years ago

Sorry for the stalkwardness, but I guess my horrorlarity made everyone feel totally brewed.

Now could those who're downvoting me please tell me what about my feedback they found either inaccurate or irrelevant?

A site like this, if it becomes popular, will absolutely further the trend of everyone wanting to talk like they're a Zooey Deschanel character. Which may or may not be a good thing. Agree? Disagree?

DanBC• 13 years ago

Vicious with no constructive criticism.

6ren• 13 years ago

"In Life*, there are many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognize, but for which no words exist.

"On the other hand, the world is littered with thousands of spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places. Our job, as wee see it, is to get these words down off the signposts and into the mouths of babes and sucklings and so on, where they can start earning their keep in everyday conversation and make a more positive contribution to society. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_Liff http://folk.uio.no/alied/TMoL.html

  KENTUCKY (adv.)
  Fitting exactly and satisfyingly. The cardboard box that slides neatly into an exact
  space in a garage, or the last book which exactly fills a bookshelf, is said to fit
  'real nice and kentucky'.

ivarious• 13 years ago

I can totally use this as a marketing tool.

DigitalSea• 13 years ago

This is actually a pretty good idea. Not sure about its longevity as Urban Dictionary tends to have a somewhat practical use, like a crowd-sourced dictionary. This is pretty fun though, I'll play around with it for a bit and see if I get hooked. The layout needs a little work I think.

whbk• 13 years ago

Congrats, HN crashed it :) Cool idea though, looking forward to checking it out when it's back up.

aspensmonster• 13 years ago

It looks like alliteration and rhyme are winning components of a suitable word.

mileszim• 13 years ago

as they should be!

pearjuice• 13 years ago

Looks like a fun thing to do - especially when gamified. Execution is a bit off though. The reply process is way too complex: if you need my email and a username for no clear reason, make me sign in or let me do it anonymous. Way too many required fields for responding - I can imagine that sometimes you just want to post a word without further explanation or detail.

The design could use some streamlining, too. It looks like some spammy Q&A site now.

usernew1817• 13 years ago

can I suggest a better layout? the title fonts are huge

seventytwo2• 13 years ago

Wow! I didn't expect it to take off like this! Hopefully, everyone is able to access the site okay now...

We're very new still, so we very much appreciate the feedback and comments so far! I know you guys are a very knowledgeable group of people, so any other comments and feedback that you might have will absolutely be added to the backlog!

Thank you all so much!

someperson• 13 years ago

Listen to the feedback here (it's quite accurate). Also when a reply is -3, make it disappear or fade out.

hoverkraft• 13 years ago

This is so great. I submitted a ton of stuff despite having to type my username and email every time. Might be hard to scale, but there's definitely a lot of potential joy in this. Many of the winning words at the moment genuinely made me giggle.

qq66• 13 years ago

I like it. It's a scalable version of Wallraff's "word fugitives" column in the Atlantic.

tsenkov• 13 years ago

Awesome idea! Best of luck.

jtheory• 13 years ago

This was "a thing" back in the 80's in the US -- does anyone remember sniglets?

There were several books published with compilations of them, sniglet-a-day calendars, etc.

dancecodes• 13 years ago

reverse dicts going more popular

I like this:

http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml

and thank you for this site

jacobr• 13 years ago

Something like this but for naming things while programming would be awesome.

dools• 13 years ago

This reminds me of emotioneric.com!

azsxdcfv• 13 years ago

Wow, this is paragraph shortener for twitter!

jbarrec• 13 years ago

Nice logo and cool concept!

tocomment• 13 years ago

Could word2vec be used as part of the algorithm for this? Ever since I read about it I've been trying to think of applications for word2vec.

tehwalrus• 13 years ago

thank you for letting me vote without creating an account. More websites should be as awesome as you.

whiddershins• 13 years ago

Might be interesting to see what happens if you hide the vote count until after someone votes. I look at a word I like and if the vote count is already really low, I figure it will never get to the top so I don't vote for it.

Show HN: WordsForThat.com - A new site that's like a reverse urban dictionary

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