Show HN: WordsForThat.com - A new site that's like a reverse urban dictionary
wordsforthat.com
wordsforthat.com
"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'.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!
There were several books published with compilations of them, sniglet-a-day calendars, etc.
The design could use some streamlining, too. It looks like some spammy Q&A site 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!
I like this:
http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml
and thank you for this site
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?
I'll rephrase it: the definitions on the site, or at least the few-dozen I looked at, seem like forced attempts at a particular strain of hip cleverness. Which is what one often sees when middle-aged writers try to script hip teenagers. And in a fairly horrifying social phenomenon, it's becoming self-reenforcing amongst the target demographic.