A free simple-to-use English dictionary for everyone.
- Break your word into single letters and create a
/-separated path - Prefix the path with
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vighnesh153/open-dictionary/main/data/ - Suffix the path with
/_.json
For fetching the definition of apple
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vighnesh153/open-dictionary/main/data/a/p/p/l/e/_.jsonPass your word to this url as a search parameter: open-dictionary.vighnesh153.workers.dev?word=<your-word>
In this, behind the scenes, I just build the GitHub URL from the approach mentioned above
- open-dictionary.vighnesh153.workers.dev?word=apple
- open-dictionary.vighnesh153.workers.dev?word=banana
- open-dictionary.vighnesh153.workers.dev?word=cat
Note: This approach is not recommended because this worker has a free limit of 100K requests per day. If a lot of people are using this, then your application might hit a downtime if the threshold is breached
You can build your own Cloudflare worker or AWS Lambda that builds the URL for you.
But why would you do this? Using approach 1 is not that difficult. It just contains a couple of string manipulation steps.
Find all the words here: metadata/all-words.txt
- No other free API for getting English definitions of a word
- No other trusted source for fetching definitions as an API
- No reliable (in terms of uptime and rate limiting) server
- This is a free repository. You don't need to pay a single penny for using this. Although you are welcome to sponsor this project if you are interested 🙌
- This repository is trustworthy because everyone can see the word definitions as code. This offers transparency and trust for developers.
- GitHub's servers are more reliable than a custom server managed by a small group of people without any funding
Found a word which is not available in this repository? Or, some definition is not matching Wiktionary's page for the word? It is possible that Wiktionary might have updated the definition for the word. Since this repo doesn't listen to changes in Wiktionary, the definitions don't get synced in this repo automatically and will need a manual update trigger.
- Create an issue specifying which word is missing or doesn't match Wiktionary's information
- It would be more awesome if you could also raise a PR for the issue (Creating a PR is easy. You just need to run the script specified in the Contributions section and verify if the JSON is correct)
Checkout the Contributions section.
A simple search on wiktionary. For example:
- Apple: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apple
- Banana: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/running
- Running: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/running
The json files will have a type of WordWiki described below:
interface WordWiki {
word: string;
etymologies: Array<Etymology>;
}
interface Etymology {
description: Array<string>;
nouns: Array<PartOfSpeech>;
verbs: Array<PartOfSpeech>;
adjectives: Array<PartOfSpeech>;
prepositions: Array<PartOfSpeech>;
adverbs: Array<PartOfSpeech>;
letter: Array<PartOfSpeech>;
number: Array<PartOfSpeech>;
}
interface PartOfSpeech {
description: string;
definitionGroups: Array<DefinitionGroup>;
}
interface DefinitionGroup {
description: string;
entries: Array<{
meaning: string;
examples: Array<string>;
}>;
}Checkout the Contributions guide
Why not use https://dictionaryapi.dev?
https://dictionaryapi.dev/ is an excellent tool for getting the word definitions. It has a few drawbacks though:
- It is hosted on the author's server which is not reliable. Lot of people have reported it being unavailable or getting rate limit throttled
- Author makes use of undocumented Google API to fetch the definition and the Google API looks very fragile. If Google decides to change the output, the Author's API will break or return malformed response.