A word of the day that doesn't suck

Hacker News

Share card

A word of the day that doesn't suck

I’ve long thought that the Word of the Day was a wasted genre. The goal should be to give you words you can use; to enrich your understanding of words you already know; or at least to use words to tell you something neat about the world. Instead, what you usually get is words that will never be used in conversation, held up as curios. Some examples from Dictionary.com’s daily email: thewless, balladmonger, vagility, contextomy. These words are... not useful. I’ve always thought I could do better. My friend Ben recently created a daily puzzle game, called Bracket City, launched here on HN [1], which I like because it takes about the same amount of time as Wordle but has some of the variety and artistry of a good crossword. Ben agreed to let me write a word of the day for the game’s audience. We’ve collected them all here: https://bracket.city/words . It’s such a joy to write -- every day, I pay homage to a word I love or use or have newly discovered. I find myself paying more attention to words I encounter, thinking if they deserve a place. It’s also fun for another reason. Many years ago I wrote a blog post, "You’re probably using the wrong dictionary" [2], that made the rounds and actually still finds new readers today. It was about how the modern-day dictionaries we find by default on our iPhones and web browsers are actually kind of bureaucratic and lifeless. Through a writer I love, John McPhee, I rediscovered Webster’s 1913 dictionary, which feels like it was written by a thinking person who loved words. I still consult it all the time. Writing a word of the day has reminded me just how delightful and useful Webster’s old dictionary is -- and reacquainted me with the OED, which I now look to every day, and which I discovered you can access with your library card. Some of my favorite entries so far: sophisticated, twee, gravitas, blockbuster, meteorologist, send, bid. There are more than 175 now -- and more coming once a day, every day, for as long as Bracket City stands. To sign up to see each word of the day as it’s published, go to https://bracket.city/words . [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43622719 [2] https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary