Wiktionary ( , , rhyming with "dictionary") is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of terms (including

word A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consen ...

phrase In syntax and grammar, a phrase is a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can con ...

s, proverbs,

linguistic reconstruction Linguistic reconstruction is the practice of establishing the features of an unattested ancestor language of one or more given languages. There are two kinds of reconstruction: * Internal reconstruction uses irregularities in a single language ...

s, etc.) in all

natural language In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languag ...

s and in a number of artificial languages. These entries may contain definitions, images for illustration, pronunciations, etymologies,

inflection In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and ...

s, usage examples,

quotation A quotation is the repetition of a sentence, phrase, or passage from speech or text that someone has said or written. In oral speech, it is the representation of an utterance (i.e. of something that a speaker actually said) that is introduced by ...

s, related terms, and

translation Translation is the communication of the Meaning (linguistic), meaning of a #Source and target languages, source-language text by means of an Dynamic and formal equivalence, equivalent #Source and target languages, target-language text. The ...

s of terms into other languages, among other features. It is collaboratively edited via a wiki. Its name is a portmanteau of the words '' wiki'' and '' dictionary''. It is available in languages and in Simple English. Like its sister project

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read ref ...

, Wiktionary is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, and is written collaboratively by volunteers, dubbed "Wiktionarians". Its wiki software,

MediaWiki MediaWiki is a Free and open-source software, free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia movement, Wikimedia Website, websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sit ...

, allows almost anyone with access to the website to create and edit entries. Because Wiktionary is not limited by print space considerations, most of Wiktionary's language editions provide definitions and translations of terms from many languages, and some editions offer additional information typically found in thesauri. Wiktionary's data is frequently used in various natural language processing tasks.

History and development

Wiktionary was brought online on December 12, 2002, following a proposal by Daniel Alston and an idea by

Larry Sanger Lawrence Mark Sanger (; born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded the online encyclopedia Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined the name and wrote much of Wikipedia's original govern ...

, co-founder of Wikipedia. On March 28, 2004, the first non- English Wiktionaries were initiated in

French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...

and Polish. Wiktionaries in numerous other languages have since been started. Wiktionary was hosted on a temporary

domain name A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. ...

(wiktionary.wikipedia.org) until May 1, 2004, when it switched to the current domain name. , Wiktionary features over 30 million articles (and even more entries) across its editions. The largest of the language editions is the English Wiktionary, with over 7.2 million entries, followed by the

Wiktionary with over 4.5 million and the Malagasy Wiktionary with over 1.7 million entries. Forty-three Wiktionary language editions contain over 100,000 entries each. Wiktionary growth

Many of the definitions at the project's largest language editions were created by bots that found creative ways to generate entries or (rarely) automatically imported thousands of entries from previously published dictionaries. Seven of the 18 bots registered at the English Wiktionary in 2007 created 163,000 of the entries there.TheDaveBot

TheCheatBot

Websterbot

PastBot

NanshuBot
Another of these bots, " ThirdPersBot," was responsible for the addition of a number of third-person

conjugation Conjugation or conjugate may refer to: Linguistics *Grammatical conjugation, the modification of a verb from its basic form * Emotive conjugation or Russell's conjugation, the use of loaded language Mathematics *Complex conjugation, the change ...

s that would not have received their own entries in standard dictionaries; for instance, it defined " smoulders" as the "third-person singular simple present form of smoulder." Of the 1,269,938 definitions the English Wiktionary provides for 996,450 English words, 478,068 are "form of" definitions of this kind. This means that even without such entries, its coverage of English is significantly larger than that of major monolingual print dictionaries. ''

Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary ''Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged'' (commonly known as ''Webster's Third'', or ''W3'') was published in September 1961. It was edited by Philip Babcock Gove and a team of lexicographers who spent 75 ...

of the English Language, Unabridged'', for instance, has 475,000 entries (with many additional embedded headwords); the ''

Oxford English Dictionary The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the first and foundational historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a com ...

'' has 615,000 headwords, but includes

Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English ...

as well, for which the English Wiktionary has an additional 34,234 gloss definitions. Detailed statistics exist to show how many entries of various kinds exist. The English Wiktionary does not rely on bots to the extent that some other editions do. The

and Vietnamese Wiktionaries, for example, imported large sections of the Free Vietnamese Dictionary Project (FVDP), which provides free content bilingual dictionaries to and from Vietnamese. These imported entries make up virtually all of the Vietnamese edition's contents. Like the English edition, the French Wiktionary has imported approximately 20,000 entries from the Unihan database of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters. The French Wiktionary grew rapidly in 2006 thanks in a large part to bots copying many entries from old, freely licensed dictionaries, such as the eighth edition of the '' Dictionnaire de l'Académie française'' (1935, around 35,000 words), and using bots to add words from other Wiktionary editions with French translations. The Russian edition grew by nearly 80,000 entries as " LXbot" added boilerplate entries (with headings, but without definitions) for words in English and German.LXbot
As of July 2021, the English Wiktionary has over 791,870 gloss definitions and over 1,269,938 total definitions (including different forms) for English entries alone, with a total of over 9,928,056 definitions across all languages.

Logos

Wiktionary has historically lacked a uniform logo across its numerous language editions. Some editions use logos that depict a dictionary entry about the term "Wiktionary", based on the previous English Wiktionary logo, which was designed by Brion Vibber, a

developer. Because a purely textual logo must vary considerably from language to language, a four-phase contest to adopt a uniform logo was held at the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki from September to October 2006. Some communities adopted the winning entry by " Smurrayinchester", a 3×3 grid of wooden tiles, each bearing a character from a different writing system. However, the poll did not see as much participation from the Wiktionary community as some community members had hoped, and a number of the larger wikis ultimately kept their textual logos. In April 2009, the issue was resurrected with a new contest. This time, a depiction by "AAEngelman" of an open hardbound dictionary won a head-to-head vote against the 2006 logo, but the process to refine and adopt the new logo then stalled. In the following years, some wikis replaced their textual logos with one of the two newer logos. In 2012, 55 wikis that had been using the English Wiktionary logo received localized versions of the 2006 design by "Smurrayinchester". In July 2016, the English Wiktionary adopted a variant of this logo. , 135 wikis, representing 61% of Wiktionary's entries, use a logo based on the 2006 design by "Smurrayinchester", 33 wikis (36%) use a textual logo, and three wikis (3%) use the 2009 design by "AAEngelman".

Criteria for ensuring accuracy

To ensure accuracy, the English Wiktionary has a policy requiring that terms be ''attested''. Terms in major languages such as English and Chinese must be verified by: # clearly widespread use, or # use in permanently recorded media, conveying meaning, in at least three independent instances spanning at least a year. For less-documented languages such as

Creek A creek in North America and elsewhere, such as Australia, is a stream that is usually smaller than a river. In the British Isles it is a small tidal inlet. Creek may also refer to: People * Creek people, also known as Muscogee, Native Americans ...

and extinct languages such as

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power ...

, one use in a permanently recorded medium or one mention in a reference work is sufficient verification.

Multi-lingual

As of , there are Wiktionary sites for languages of which are active and are closed. Wikimedia's

API:Sitematrix. Retrieved from Data:Wikipedia statistics/meta.tab The active sites have articles, and the closed sites have articles. Wikimedia's

API:Siteinfo. Retrieved from Data:Wikipedia statistics/data.tab There are registered users of which are recently active. The top ten Wiktionary language projects by mainspace article count: For a complete list with totals see Wikimedia Statistics:

Critical reception

Critical reception of Wiktionary has been mixed. In 2006,

Jill Lepore Jill Lepore is an American historian and journalist. She is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at ''The New Yorker'', where she has contributed since 2005. She writes about American ...

wrote in the article "Noah's Ark" for ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issue ...

,''

There's no show of hands at ''Wiktionary''. There's not even an editorial staff. "Be your own lexicographer!", might be ''Wiktionary's'' motto. Who needs experts? Why pay good money for a dictionary written by lexicographers when we could cobble one together ourselves?

''Wiktionary'' isn't so much republican or
democratic Democrat, Democrats, or Democratic may refer to: Politics *A proponent of democracy, or democratic government; a form of government involving rule by the people. *A member of a Democratic Party: **Democratic Party (United States) (D) **Democratic ...
as
Maoist Maoism, officially called Mao Zedong Thought by the Chinese Communist Party, is a variety of Marxism–Leninism that Mao Zedong developed to realise a socialist revolution in the agricultural, pre-industrial society of the Republic of Ch ...
. And it's only as good as the copyright-expired books from which it pilfers.

Keir Graff Keir Graff (born 1969) is an American novelist and literary editor. Biography Graff was born and raised in Missoula, Montana. He has had four novels published and is also the executive editor of '' Booklist Publications'' at the American Libr ...

's review for '' Booklist'' was less critical:

Is there a place for Wiktionary? Undoubtedly. The industry and enthusiasm of its many creators are proof that there's a market. And it's wonderful to have another strong source to use when searching the odd terms that pop up in today's fast-changing world and the online environment. But as with so many Web sources (including this column), it's best used by sophisticated users in conjunction with more reputable sources.

References in other publications are fleeting and part of larger discussions of Wikipedia, not progressing beyond a definition, although David Brooks in '' The Nashua Telegraph'' described it as "wild and woolly". One of the impediments to independent coverage of Wiktionary is the continuing confusion that it is merely an extension of Wikipedia. The measure of correctness of the inflections for a subset of the Polish words in the English Wiktionary showed that this grammatical data is very stable. Only 131 out of 4,748 Polish words have had their inflection data corrected. , Wiktionary has seen growing use in

academia An academy ( Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary or tertiary higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membership). The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy ...

Wiktionary data in natural language processing

Wiktionary has semi-structured data. Wiktionary lexicographic data can be converted to machine-readable format in order to be used in natural language processing tasks. Wiktionary's data mining is a complex task. There are the following difficulties: *(1) the constant and frequent changes to data and schemata *(2) the heterogeneity in Wiktionary language edition schemata and *(3) the human-centric nature of a wiki. There are several

parsers Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term ''parsing'' comes from Lat ...

for different Wiktionary language editions: * DBpedia Wiktionary : a subproject of DBpedia, the data are extracted from English, French, German, and Russian Wiktionaries; the data includes language, parts of speech, definitions, semantic relations and translations. The declarative description of the page schema,

regular expression A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" ...

s and finite state transducer are used in order to extract information. * JWKTL (

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

Wiktionary Library) : provides access to English Wiktionary and German Wiktionary dumps via a Java Wiktionary API. The data includes language, parts of speech, definitions, quotations, semantic relations, etymologies and translations. JWKTL is distributed under the Apache License. * wikokit : the parser of English Wiktionary and Russian Wiktionary. The parsed data includes language, parts of speech, definitions, quotations, semantic relations and translations. This is a multi-licensed open-source software. * Etymological entries have been parsed in the Etymological WordNet project. Examples of natural language processing tasks which have been solved with the help of Wiktionary data include: * Rule-based machine translation between

Dutch language Dutch ( ) is a West Germanic language spoken by about 25 million people as a first language and 5 million as a second language. It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language, after its close relatives German and English. '' Afrikaan ...

and

Afrikaans Afrikaans (, ) is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their enslaved people. Afrikaans g ...

; data of English Wiktionary, Dutch Wiktionary and Wikipedia were used with the Apertium machine translation platform. * Construction of machine-readable dictionary by the parser NULEX, which integrates open linguistic resources: English Wiktionary, WordNet, and VerbNet. The parser NULEX scrapes English Wiktionary for tense information (verbs), plural form and parts of speech (nouns). * Speech recognition and synthesis, where Wiktionary was used to automatically create pronunciation dictionaries. Word-pronunciation pairs were retrieved from 6 Wiktionary language editions ( Czech, English, French, Spanish, Polish, and German). Pronunciations are in terms of the International Phonetic Alphabet. The ASR system based on English Wiktionary has the highest word error rate, where each third

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...

has to be changed. *

Ontology engineering In computer science, information science and systems engineering, ontology engineering is a field which studies the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, which encompasses a representation, formal naming and definition of the categ ...

and semantic network constructing. * Ontology matching. * Text simplification. Medero & Ostendorf assessed vocabulary difficulty ( reading level detection) with the help of Wiktionary data. Properties of words extracted from Wiktionary entries (definition length and

POS POS, Pos or PoS may refer to: Linguistics * Part of speech, the role that a word or phrase plays in a sentence * Poverty of the stimulus, a linguistic term used in language acquisition and development * Sayula Popoluca (ISO 639-3), an indigenous l ...

, sense, and translation counts) were investigated. Medero & Ostendorf expected that **(1) very common words will be more likely to have multiple parts of speech, **(2) common words will be more likely to have multiple senses, **(3) common words will be more likely to have been translated into multiple languages. These features extracted from Wiktionary entries were useful in distinguishing word types that appear in Simple English Wikipedia articles from words that only appear in the Standard English comparable articles. * Part-of-speech tagging. Li et al. (2012) built multilingual POS-taggers for eight resource-poor languages on the basis of English Wiktionary and hidden Markov models. * Sentiment analysis. " Wikidata:Lexicographical data" was started in 2018 to provide structured data support to Wiktionaries. It stores word data of all languages in a machine readable data model, under a dedicated " Lexeme" namespace in Wikidata. As of October 2021, the project has amassed over 600,000 lexeme entries of various languages.

Notes

References

Citations

Sources

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

External links

* * List of all Wiktionary editions * * * /en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Multilingual_statistics Wiktionary's multilingual statistics* Wikimedia's page on Wiktionary (including list of all existing Wiktionaries) * Pages about Wiktionary in Meta. {{Dictionaries of English Advertising-free websites Etymological dictionaries Internet properties established in 2002 MediaWiki websites Multilingual websites Online dictionaries Wikimedia projects