I wrote a post on June 22 asking about a thesaurus web service, and quickly heard back about the Wordnik API.

Yesterday I got a chance to try it out, but their sample code for JavaScript was hard to wade through. It was easier to start from scratch and use jQuery to call their service, which luckily has CORS set up so it can be called directly from code running in the browser. No need for an intermediate proxy server. This is the modern way to do APIs.

Here's the demo app I put together to show you how it works. And the JavaScript source code in a gist. I'm using the api key they use in their demos. Of course if you're going to deploy something using this API you should get your own key.

I'll have a nice app that uses Wordnik on Monday, the one I described in the June 22 blog post. It's every bit as much fun as I imagined it would be.

Thanks to the Wordnik people for putting this out there. I love playing with words, and they've provided a very rich environment for doing that.