Do you have a general question or problem? Send it to feedback@wordnik.com.

The Wordnik Team

Erin McKean, CEO, Co-Founder

Before starting Wordnik, Erin McKean was editor in chief for American Dictionaries at Oxford University Press. She is the editor of the irregularly-published recreational-linguistics journal VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly, and the author of Weird and Wonderful Words, More Weird and Wonderful Words, Totally Weird and Wonderful Words, and That's Amore (also about words). She has served on the board of the Dictionary Society of North America and on the editorial board for its journal, Dictionaries, as well as on the editorial board for the journal of the American Dialect Society, American Speech. She also serves on the advisory boards of the Credo Reference and the Dictionary of American Regional English. She has a A.B./A.M. in linguistics from the University of Chicago. She rants about dresses on her blog (A Dress A Day, listed as one of the top fifty fashion blogs online by FashionIQ), and is disconcertingly bad at Scrabble (but surprisingly good at roller-skating). She can be reached at erin@wordnik.com.

Grant Barrett, Editorial Director, Co-Founder

Grant Barrett is an American lexicographer and dictionary editor specializing in slang and new words. Grant is also co-host of the nationwide language-related public radio show A Way With Words, and compiler and editor of the Official Dictionary of Unofficial English and the Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang. He serves as vice president of the American Dialect Society, chair of its New Words Committee, editor of the "Among the New Words" column of the society's journal American Speech, member of the journal's editorial review board, and organizer of the society's annual "word of the year" vote. He also writes a fortnightly column about English-language slang for the Malaysia Star and a bi-monthly dictionary update for the journal Copyediting. Grant holds a BA in French from Columbia University and has studied at the Université Paris Diderot. He can be reached at grant@wordnik.com.

Tony Tam, VPE, Technical Co-Founder

Tony is a San Francisco Bay Area native. He received his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from UC Santa Barbara and his MBA from Santa Clara University. He was the founding engineer and SVP of Engineering at Think Passenger, the leading provider of customer collaboration software. Prior to joining Passenger, he was lead engineer at Composite Software of San Mateo, California. At Composite Software he helped developed the company's first- and second-generation query processing engines and led the research and implementation of their patented cost-based federated query optimizer. Prior to that he led software development in the bioinformatics group at Galileo Labs, a drug-discovery company based in the Silicon Valley. He can be reached at tony@wordnik.com.

John McGrath, Product Development, founder of Wordie.org

John McGrath created Wordie.org, a social network for lexophiles, which became part of Wordnik in September of 2009. John has worked as a software engineer at The New York Times, Librarything.com, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and co-founded Squirl, a social network for collectors. He has a degree in History from Bowdoin College and a MS in Journalism from Columbia University. He can be reached at john@wordnik.com or @Wordie.

Kumanan Rajamanikkam, Lead Engineer

Kumanan was principle engineer at Composite Software of San Mateo, California, where he worked on indexing, searching, and a federated query engine. Prior to that he worked as senior software engineer at Elance.com on a product which does services procurement and management. He loves to play and watch cricket, and to play board games such as Settlers of Catan. He can be reached at kumanan@wordnik.com.

Krishna Vemuri, Lead Corpus Engineer

Krishna was lead engineer at Think Passenger, where he was responsible for building new features, improving the overall architecture, and maintaining the product. Prior to that he was an engineering manager at Evite.com, where he led the software development group. He has an MS in Software Engineering from Golden Gate University in San Francisco, and a Bachelor's in Engineering in Computer Science. He can be reached at krishna@wordnik.com.

Jeremy Kahn, Computational Linguist

Jeremy thinks words and numbers are like chocolate and peanut butter, although he's aware that some people are allergic to peanuts. He is a Linguistics PhD candidate at the University of Washington (Seattle), a member of the UW-EE SSLI lab, and a visiting fellow at the STAR lab at SRI International. His PhD research is on combining linguistic data structures with statistical models for speech recognition and machine translation. Before graduate school, he was a computational linguist at Eloquent Technology (now part of Nuance) and Conversay after receiving a Linguistics AB cum laude from Brown University. Jeremy will sometimes unconsciously code-switch into American Southern English at rural gas stations, and has been identified as a partisan irregular of the Empirical Underground. He can be reached at jeremy@wordnik.com.

Mary Mark Ockerbloom, Corpus Librarian

Mary Mark Ockerbloom holds a MS in Computer Science from the University of Saskatchewan, and has been the organizer, since 1994, of the online book initiative A Celebration of Women Writers, coordinating more than 200 volunteers engaged in collaborative development of online editions of works by women, with more than 300 digital books, listings for about 16,000 authors, and links to about 10,000 author information pages and more than 5500 complete online editions. She likes to read.

Tim Allen, Corpus Technician (First-Class)

Tim Allen received his B.A. with honors in Linguistics in 2006 from the University of Chicago, where he is currently a Ph.D. student in French in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.  He is also a project manager and data munger for the ARTFL Project .

Russell Horton, Corpus Technician (First-Class)

Russell just transplanted his avocado farm from St. Paul, Minnesota, to La Jolla, California, where he is thrilled to be a doctoral student in computational linguistics at UCSD. Before that, he has been an acolyte of the ARTFL Project Project at the University of Chicago since early in his undergraduate days there (AB Linguistics 2002). At ARTFL he worked on text search and retrieval, machine learning and data mining for humanities applications, and automated discovery of textual reuse across vast corpora. When he's not niking words or teaching computers to nik them, he likes to be on, in or under the water. He has seen a beaked whale breach and expose its flukes, which is unattested in the literature. In many languages, the typographical "at symbol" @ is called by that language's word for "monkey". You can reach Russell at russ monkey wordnik dot com.