Detroit businessman Dan Gilbert is now in the online dictionary and thesaurus business.
Gilbert's Rock Holdings said Thursday that it has purchased the websites Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com from New York-based media firm IAC. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The websites date to 1995 and are free for public use. They feature a significant amount of online advertisements.
Gilbert announced the sale on his Twitter account and was quoted at length in a cheeky, and at times nonsensical, news release:
"From the genesis, we admit to invariable conjecture in the unmitigated competency of online mechanization to ameliorate the total sum of completed undertakings throughout our mortal existence," Gilbert said in the release. "Cognition and discourse are conjointly associated."
Rock Holdings is the parent company of mortgage giant Quicken Loans and other Gilbert-owned financial services firms. Gilbert announced Wednesday that he was selling Greektown Casino-Hotel in Detroit for $1 billion.
The websites were started in 1995 and later acquired by IAC, which also owns Match.com, Vimeo and the smartphone-based dating service Tinder. Dictionary.com is the 447th most trafficked website in the country and Thesaurus.com is the 235th, according to the website tracking service SimilarWeb.
A Rock Holdings spokesman declined to discuss any details about the websites or its future plans for them.
