Wiktionary
Wiktionary is a
Wikimedia Foundation project intended to be a free
wiki dictionary (hence: Wiktionary) (including
thesaurus and
lexicon) in every
language. It is a
sister project to
Wikipedia. It is located at
wiktionary.org.
Wiktionary serves to:
* Explain the meanings of
words, multi-word terms,
idiomatic phrases, and
abbreviations.
* Act as a thesaurus by showing
synonyms and related terms.
* Explain
etymologies of words.
*
Translate words from one language to another.
|
Growth of the largest eight wiktionaries. |
Wiktionary was brought online on
December 12,
2002 following a proposal by Daniel Alston. On
March 29,
2004 the first non-
English Wiktionaries were initiated in
French and
Polish. Wiktionaries in numerous other languages have since been started. Wiktionary was hosted on a temporary
URL (wiktionary.wikipedia.org) until
May 1,
2004 when it switched to the current full URL.
[Wiktionary's current URL is www.wiktionary.org.] As of May 2006, the English Wiktionary has more than 140,000 entries, although in early 2006 it was surpassed by the French Wiktionary, which now has more than 175,000 entries. More than a dozen languages now have Wiktionaries containing at least 10,000 entries.
Top Ten WiktionariesUnlike many dictionaries, which are monolingual or bilingual, Wiktionary is
multilingual, meaning that the goal is to define every word from all known languages in every other language, as well as in the original language itself. For example, the English Wiktionary is written in English but accepts entries for words from all languages. The French Wiktionary can also have entries for all those same words, but the entries are written in French.
One difference between Wiktionary and Wikipedia is that pages beginning with
upper- and
lowercase letters can refer to different things. For example, the entries on lowercase "
i" and uppercase "
I" are distinct. All of the existing entries in the English Wiktionary were converted to lowercase automatically in mid-
2005; manual intervention was used to move pages to uppercase (or split entries) as necessary. Links from Wikipedia to Wiktionary must be made with care, as it may be relevant to link to a lowercase entry, link to an uppercase entry, link to an entry with diacritics or link to multiple entries.
WikiSaurus is a category in the English Wiktionary whose purpose is to serve as a
thesaurus, including a thesaurus of
slang words.
See
"Creating a WikiSaurus entry" for the structure of wikiSaurus entries. An example of a well-formatted entry would be the "
wiktionary:WikiSaurus:insane" page.
*
*
Wiktionary**
In English*
Wiktionary's Multilingual Statistics*
Wikimedia's page on Wiktionary (including list of all existing Wiktionaries)
*
The Wiktionary Widget for the
Mac OS X Dashboard which pulls up Wiktionary articles
See also
* http://www.thefreedictionary.com/
