Wiktionary

The Wiktionary (contraction of wiki and dictionary; in English, Wiktionary) is a project of Free dictionary from the Wikimedia Foundation, containing definitions, translations, etymologies, synonyms, and pronunciations of words in multiple languages. It is based on wiki technology, in particular through the use of the MediaWiki software, and its content is protected by the free GFDL and CC BY-SA licences.

The first Wiktionary was the English version, created by Brion Vibber on December 12, 2002, followed shortly by the French and Polish versions. On May 1, 2004, Tim Starling initialized the websites where the respective Wiktionaries would be hosted for each language that had a corresponding Wikipedia, resulting in 143 new Wiktionaries in total, including Spanish. The number of versions reached 163 languages in January 2023.

Within Wikipedia, the link to link a word directly to the Wiktionary is :wikt:. For example, to refer the reader to the definition of the term "dictionary", type: [[:wikt:dictionary]].

History

Wiktionary went online on December 12, 2002. Other languages were uploaded on March 28, 2004, and French and Polish Wiktionaries began to be created. Since then Wiktionaries have started to be used in many other languages. The Wiktionary was hosted on a temporary domain name until May 1, 2004, when it changed to the current domain name.

Like other projects that use wiki technology, the use of bots to automate tasks is allowed in Wiktionary, although it has occasionally presented problems. One of the bots, dubbed "ThirdPersBot", was responsible for adding numerous meanings for third person verb conjugations, many of which would not have received their own entry in standard dictionaries. For example, this bot defined "smolders" as the "present simple third person singular form of smolder". Of the 1,269,938 definitions that the English Wiktionary provides for 996,450 different English words, 478,068 meanings are definitions of this type, that is, that present a variation in conjugation instead of a completely unique lemma. Yet, even removing these 'redundant' definitions, the coverage of English vocabulary is significantly greater than that of the leading monolingual paper dictionaries.

The English Wiktionary does not rely as much on bots compared to other editions. At the other extreme are the French and Vietnamese versions of Wiktionary, which through the use of bots imported large sections of the Free Vietnamese Dictionary Project (FVDP), a project that provides bilingual dictionaries of Free content to and from the Vietnamese language.

Wiktionaries by number of editions

Cover Wikcionario en español