
Show HN: WordsForThat.com - A new site that's like a reverse urban dictionary - seventytwo
http://www.wordsforthat.com
======
6ren
"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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_Liff)
[http://folk.uio.no/alied/TMoL.html](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'.

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acjohnson55
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.

~~~
seventytwo
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
Please ban the word "totally" from definition examples.

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jtheory
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.

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pearjuice
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.

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

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qq66
I like it. It's a scalable version of Wallraff's "word fugitives" column in
the Atlantic.

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

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DigitalSea
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.

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

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hoverkraft
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.

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whiddershins
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.

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tocomment
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.

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

~~~
mileszim
as they should be!

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

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dancecodes
reverse dicts going more popular

I like this:

[http://www.onelook.com/reverse-
dictionary.shtml](http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml)

and thank you for this site

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azsxdcfv
Wow, this is paragraph shortener for twitter!

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ivarious
I can totally use this as a marketing tool.

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

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dools
This reminds me of emotioneric.com!

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jbarrec
Nice logo and cool concept!

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tsenkov
Awesome idea! Best of luck.

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usernew1817
can I suggest a better layout? the title fonts are huge

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

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CrankyPants
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
Vicious with no constructive criticism.

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CrankyPants
Thanks. Viciousness wasn't my intent.

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.

~~~
billmalarky
Eh, "chillax" dude. It's all in good fun, I don't think anyone is taking this
as seriously as you.

