Wordnik is an unconventional dictionary who’s goal is to show you as much information as possible, as fast as they can find it, for every word in English.

Wordnik is a heavy user of 10Gen’s nosql database MongoDB. They just recently blogged about their 1 year anniversary of moving from MySql to MongoDB. Some of the statistics include:

• MongoDB servers an average of 500k requests/per hour. With 4x that number during peak periods
• More than 12 billion documents stored by MongoDB
• Around 3 TB storage per node
• Easily sustained insert speeds of 8k documents/second, often with bursts to 50k documents/second
• Every retrieval type is faster than MySql
  • example fetch time reduced from 400ms to 60ms
  • dictionary entries from 20ms to 1ms
  • document metadata from 30ms to .1ms
  • spelling suggestions from 10ms to 1.2ms