[1][2] Wiktionary, the free open dictionary project, is one major source of words and citations used by Wordnik.

[5] Cofounders of the site are CEO Erin McKean, editorial director Grant Barrett, and chief computational lexicographer Orion Montoya, and head of engineering Anthony Tam.

[6][4] McKean, Barrett, and Montoya all formerly worked in the US Dictionaries Department of Oxford University Press.

[1] In January 2011, McKean relaunched the company as Reverb Technologies, Inc. in Palo Alto, with Wordnik co-founder Anthony Tam.

[11] The company began a Kickstarter campaign in 2015 with the purpose of finding and adding a million words to Wordnik that had not yet been included in major English dictionaries.