General Question

evanchaney's avatar

Are there any Web services available for free to retrieve the definitions of words?

Asked by evanchaney (34points) July 23rd, 2008

I’m considering building an application and need to be able to define a given word. I want the data store to be thorough (think Google definitions) and constantly updated. Looking at making calls to a Web service to accomplish this.

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9 Answers

evanchaney's avatar

Do those sites have Web service APIs?

evanchaney (34points)“Great Answer” (0points) Flag as…
El_Cadejo's avatar

No clue, sorry. Maybe someone else knows. Welcome to fluther anyhow.

El_Cadejo (34610points)“Great Answer” (0points) Flag as…
mirza's avatar

Why not just use Dappper ?
It’ll fetch the definitions from websites such as http://dictionary.com and display it in any form you want

mirza (5057points)“Great Answer” (1points) Flag as…
andrew's avatar

I remember in college someone had written a simple http://dictionary.com scraper.

You could definitely use wordnet.

andrew (16543points)“Great Answer” (1points) Flag as…
sccrowell's avatar

You might give http://wordweb.com a try, I Think it is GREAT!

sccrowell (3508points)“Great Answer” (0points) Flag as…
paulc's avatar

I also suggest wordnet – there is also at least one library for each popular language to interface with it.

Alternatively, you could scrape die.net’s dictionary which also happens to use wordnet as one of its sources.

paulc (2924points)“Great Answer” (0points) Flag as…
Vincentt's avatar

You might like FreeDict. I also might just have seen that UrbanDictionary has an API.

Vincentt (8094points)“Great Answer” (0points) Flag as…

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