Largest open-source dictionary w/ brief definitions (not wiktionary)

Question

What's the largest open-source dictionary that includes brief definitions of each word? Wiktionary is a great resource but:

There are over 200K words in the scowl list that aren't in wiktionary. I'd use scowl directly, but it only list words and has no definitions.
Wiktionary intentionally includes misspellings (sometimes not marked as such, and sometimes as redirection), and I'm looking for only correctly-spelled words.
Wiktionary's definitions are often lengthy, not brief.
It's difficult to automatically extract the portion of a wiktionary page that's the definition.

I'm somewhat surprised this question isn't in the FAQ, and that I couldn't find the answer by searching this site.

Could you provide a link for this "scowl list"? I've not heard of it before. — hippietrail, May 05 '11 at 00:55
I just compared the last wordlist (all "words" files) to enwiktionary-20151102-all-titles and there are 240k words "missing" from Wiktionary, of which 80k are just duplicates of actual words + "'s" ending and so on. Only 176 words are missing from the "medium" list, 3k from the large, 38k from the huge. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Requested_entries_%28English%29/Wordlist — Nemo, Nov 13 '15 at 23:17
I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is a request for resources. — Jim, Jan 24 '18 at 22:05

score 23 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 24 '22 at 00:57

23

You may be looking for WordNet, a lexical database for English developed by Princeton's Computer Science department. It has a permissive license allowing free use even in commercial applications. However, WordNet does not have “closed-class” words, including pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, determiners, and particles.

edited Apr 24 '22 at 00:57

mormegil

103

answered Jan 08 '11 at 18:34

nohat

68,560

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 08 '11 at 17:01

The moreofit web site can be a good start to find sites similar to, here, wiktionary:

www.moreofit.com/similar-to/en.wiktionary.org/Top_10_Sites_Like_Wiktionary_En

The result includes dict.org, which can be of interest considering what you are after.

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 18 '11 at 22:22

3

I agree that WordNet is a pretty good source for definitions. I have started to build a multilingual dictionary (Deect) on top of WordNet's English words and definitions (actually included a few more things), and the users usually like the definitions from WordNet.

answered Jan 18 '11 at 22:22

2

I wonder why such awesome site is closed. – Real Dreams Jan 27 '14 at 04:43
2

I would be great if you would release the project as open source, would you consider creating an organization on github? I would be willing to contribute, clean data, help maintain it etc. – OpenCoderX Jul 25 '15 at 12:28
seriously, give this to the community....you can store it on open data stack exchange's repository at datahub.io – albert Nov 14 '15 at 01:52
I have just started a project like this (quite early stage) with MIT license: https://github.com/poetyi/translator-app – pnz1337 Sep 07 '21 at 13:11

Largest open-source dictionary w/ brief definitions (not wiktionary)

3 Answers3

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