Wiktionary
Screenshot of wiktionary. org home page
URL	http://www.wiktionary.org/
Slogan	the free dictionary
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Online dictionary
Registration	Optional
Available language(s)	Multi-lingual (over 150)
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedia community
Launched	December 12, 2002
Current status	active

Wiktionary (a portmanteau of wiki and dictionary) is a multilingual, Web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in over 151 languages. Uniform Resource Locator is an URI which also specifies where the identified resource is available and the protocol for retrieving it A slogan is a memorable Motto or Phrase used in a Political, commercial, Religious and other context as a repetitive expression of A dictionary is a book of alphabetically listed Words in a specific language with definitions etymologies pronunciations and other information or a book of alphabetically In the Philosophy of language, a natural language (or ordinary language) is a Language that is spoken or written in phonemic-alphabetic or phonemically-related The Wikimedia Foundation Inc is a Non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (born August 7 1966 is an American Internet entrepreneur known Events 627 - Battle of Nineveh: A Byzantine army under Emperor Heraclius defeats Emperor Khosrau II 's Persian See also 2002 (disambiguation Year 2002 ( MMII) was a Common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content using a simplified Markup language. A dictionary is a book of alphabetically listed Words in a specific language with definitions etymologies pronunciations and other information or a book of alphabetically The World Wide Web (commonly shortened to the Web) is a system of interlinked Hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. _____ __ / ___/ / /_ ____ ____ \__ \ / __/ / __ \ / __ \ ___/ / / /_ A dictionary is a book of alphabetically listed Words in a specific language with definitions etymologies pronunciations and other information or a book of alphabetically Unlike standard dictionaries, it is written collaboratively by volunteers using wiki software, allowing articles to be changed by almost anyone with access to the Web site. A volunteer is someone who works for a community or for the benefit of environment primarily because they choose to do so Wiki software is a type of Collaborative software that runs a Wiki system

Like its sister project Wikipedia, Wiktionary is run by the Wikimedia Foundation. ***************************************************************************************** * * The Wikimedia Foundation Inc is a Non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, Because Wiktionary is not limited by print space considerations, most of Wiktionary's language editions provide definitions and translations of words from many languages, and some editions offer additional information typically found in Thesauruses and lexicons. A thesaurus is a book that contains Synonyms and sometimes Antonyms, in contrast to a Dictionary, which contains Definitions and Pronunciations In Linguistics, the lexicon (from Greek Λεξικόν of a language is its Vocabulary, including its words and expressions Additionally, the English Wiktionary includes Wikisaurus, a category that serves as a thesaurus, including lists of slang words,^[1] and the Simple English Wiktionary, compiled using the Basic English subset of the English language. Slang is the use of highly informal Words and expressions that are not considered standard in the speaker's Dialect or Language. Basic English is an attempted core Subset of The English language created by Charles Kay Ogden and described in his book Basic English A General Introduction

History and development

Wiktionary was brought online on December 12, 2002 following a proposal by Daniel Alston. Events 627 - Battle of Nineveh: A Byzantine army under Emperor Heraclius defeats Emperor Khosrau II 's Persian See also 2002 (disambiguation Year 2002 ( MMII) was a Common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. On March 29, 2004 the first non-English Wiktionaries were initiated in French and Polish. Events 1461 - Wars of the Roses: Battle of Towton - Edward of York defeats Queen Margaret to become King "MMIV" redirects here For the Modest Mouse album see " Baron von Bullshit Rides Again " English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people Polish ( język polski, polszczyzna) is the Official language of Poland. Wiktionaries in numerous other languages have since been started. Wiktionary was hosted on a temporary URL (wiktionary. Uniform Resource Locator is an URI which also specifies where the identified resource is available and the protocol for retrieving it wikipedia. org) until May 1, 2004 when it switched to the current full URL. Events 305 - Diocletian and Maximian retire from the office of Roman Emperor. "MMIV" redirects here For the Modest Mouse album see " Baron von Bullshit Rides Again " ^[2] As of November 2006, Wiktionary features over 1. 5 million entries across its 171 language editions. The largest of the language editions is the English Wiktionary, with over 400,000 entries. It was surpassed in early 2006 by the French Wiktionary, only to regain the top position in September 2006. Eight Wiktionary language editions now contain over 100,000 entries each.

The use of bots to generate large numbers of articles is visible as "growth spurts" in this graph of article counts at the largest eight Wiktionary editions (data from November 2007). Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century.

Despite Wiktionary's large number of entries, most of the entries and 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. Internet bots, also known as web robots, WWW robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet Seven of the 18 bots registered at the English Wiktionary^[3] created 163,000 of the entries there. ^[4] Only 259 entries remain (each containing many definitions) on Wiktionary from the original import by Websterbot from public domain sources; the majority of those imports have been split out to thousands of proper entries manually. Another one of these bots, "ThirdPersBot," was responsible for the addition of a number of third-person conjugations that would not receive their own entries in standard dictionaries; for instance, it defined "smoulders" as the "third-person singular simple present form of smoulder. Grammatical person, in Linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event such as the speaker the Addressee, or others In Linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a Verb, Noun or Adjective from its Principal parts by Inflection " Excluding these 163,000 entries, the English Wiktionary would have about 137,000 entries, including terms unique to languages other than English, making it smaller than most monolingual print dictionaries. The Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, has 615,000 headwords, while Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged has 475,000 entries (with many additional embedded headwords). The Oxford English Dictionary ( OED) published by the Oxford University Press (OUP is a comprehensive Dictionary of the English Webster's Dictionary is the name given to a common type of English language dictionary in the United States. It should be noted, though, that more detailed statistics now exist to more clearly distinguish genuine entries from minor (small) entries.

The English Wiktionary, however does not rely on bots to the extent that somewhat smaller editions do. The French 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. French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people Vietnamese ( tiếng Việt, or less commonly Việt ngữ) formerly known under French colonization as Annamese ( see Annam) ^[5] These imported entries make up virtually all of the Vietnamese edition's offering. Like the English edition, the French Wiktionary has imported the approximately 20,000 entries in the Unihan database of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters. CJK is a collective term for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which constitute the main East Asian languages. The French Wiktionary grew rapidly in 2006 thanks in 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 Dictionnaire de l'Académie française is the official Dictionary of the French language in France. 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. Russian ( transliteration:,) is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages The German language (de ''Deutsch'') is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages. ^[6]

The logo designed by "Smurrayinchester". Chosen by a contest at Meta-Wiki, it is used by thirteen Wiktionary editions.

Most of Wiktionary currently uses a textual logo designed by Brion Vibber, a MediaWiki developer. MediaWiki is a web-based Wiki software application used by all projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, all wikis hosted by Wikia, and ^[7] Despite frequent discussion of modifying or replacing the logo, a four-phase contest held at the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki from September to October 2006^[8] did not see as much participation from the Wiktionary community as some community members had hoped. September 2006 was marked by a controversy surrounding statements made by Pope Benedict XVI regarding Islam, during the same week as the fifth anniversary As of June 2007, the French, Vietnamese, Turkish, Arabic, Italian, Swedish, Korean, Dutch, Lithuanian, Persian, Sicilian, Simple English, and Wolof editions have switched to the contest-chosen logo; the remaining editions use either the textual logo or, in the case of the Galician Wiktionary, a logo that depicts a dictionary bearing the Galician coat of arms. Turkish ( tr Türkçe IPA) is a language spoken by over 63 million people worldwide making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Arabic (ar الْعَرَبيّة (informally ar عَرَبيْ) in terms of the number of speakers is the largest living member of the Semitic language Italian ( or lingua italiana) is a Romance language spoken by about 63 million people as a First language, primarily in Italy. Swedish ( is a North Germanic language spoken by more than nine million people predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along the This article is mainly about the spoken Korean language See Hangul for details on the native Korean writing system Dutch ( is a West Germanic language spoken by around 24 million people 22 million of which are from the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname Lithuanian ( lietuvių kalba) is the official state language of Lithuania and is recognised as one of the official languages of the European Union. Sicilian (scn '''''lu sicilianu''''' lingua siciliana, also known as Siculu or Calabro-Sicilian) is a Romance language. Galicia (occasionally Galiza) is an autonomous community in northwest Spain.

Critical reception

Critical reception of Wiktionary has been mixed. Jill Lepore wrote in the article "Noah’s Ark" for The New Yorker, (November 6, 2006)^[9]

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 can cobble one together ourselves?

Wiktionary isn’t so much republican or democratic as Maoist. And it’s only as good as the copyright-expired books from which it pilfers. If you look up the word "Webster" in the Wiktionary, you will be redirected to this handy tip:

Noah Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, 1911 (published by Merriam-Webster, Springfield, MA) is a public domain dictionary, as is a 1913 edition, that can be used to empower Wiktionary with more definitions.

But, hey, at least they got his first name right.

Keir Graff’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. The Telegraph, frequently referred to as the Nashua Telegraph, is a daily Newspaper in Nashua, New Hampshire. ^[10] (Wooly is defined as "confused" and "unrestrained. "^[11]) One of the impediments to independent coverage of Wiktionary is the continuing confusion that it is merely an extension of Wikipedia. ^[12] In 2005, PC Magazine rated Wiktionary as one of the Internet's "Top 101 Web Sites,"^[13] although little information was given about the site. PC Magazine (sometimes referred to as PC Mag) is a Computer magazine that is published monthly in the United States (until 2008 it was published

Wiktionary statistics

See also

• OmegaWiki, a translating multilingual dictionary based on an extension of MediaWiki. French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States Vietnamese ( tiếng Việt, or less commonly Việt ngữ) formerly known under French colonization as Annamese ( see Annam) Vietnamese ( tiếng Việt, or less commonly Việt ngữ) formerly known under French colonization as Annamese ( see Annam) Turkish ( tr Türkçe IPA) is a language spoken by over 63 million people worldwide making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Turkish ( tr Türkçe IPA) is a language spoken by over 63 million people worldwide making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Russian ( transliteration:,) is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages Russian ( transliteration:,) is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages Ido (ˈiːdoʊ is a Constructed language created with the goal of becoming a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds as a language easier Ido (ˈiːdoʊ is a Constructed language created with the goal of becoming a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds as a language easier Greek (el ελληνική γλώσσα or simply el ελληνικά — "Hellenic" is an Indo-European language, spoken today by 15-22 million people mainly Greek (el ελληνική γλώσσα or simply el ελληνικά — "Hellenic" is an Indo-European language, spoken today by 15-22 million people mainly Arabic (ar الْعَرَبيّة (informally ar عَرَبيْ) in terms of the number of speakers is the largest living member of the Semitic language Arabic (ar الْعَرَبيّة (informally ar عَرَبيْ) in terms of the number of speakers is the largest living member of the Semitic language Polish ( język polski, polszczyzna) is the Official language of Poland. Polish ( język polski, polszczyzna) is the Official language of Poland. MediaWiki is a web-based Wiki software application used by all projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, all wikis hosted by Wikia, and

References

External links

• Wiktionary front page
  • English Wiktionary
• Wiktionary's Multilingual Statistics
• Wikimedia's page on Wiktionary (including list of all existing Wiktionaries)
• Pages about Wiktionary in Meta.
• The Wiktionary Widget for the Mac OS X Dashboard which pulls up Wiktionary articles. Mac OS X (mæk oʊ ɛs tɛn is a line of computer Operating systems developed marketed and sold by Apple Inc, the latest of which is pre-loaded on all currently Dashboard is an application for Apple 's Mac OS X operating systems used for hosting mini-applications known as widgets.