Concept

Wiktionary

Overview

Wiktionary (US: WIK-shə-nerr-ee, UK: WIK-shə-nər-ee; rhyming with "dictionary") is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of terms (including words, phrases, proverbs, linguistic reconstructions, etc.) in a large number of natural languages and a number of artificial languages. These entries may contain definitions, images for illustration, pronunciations, etymologies, inflections, usage examples, quotations, related terms, and translations of terms into other languages, among other features. It is collaboratively edited by volunteers via a wiki. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki and dictionary. It is available in 198 languages and in Simple English. Like its sister project Wikipedia, Wiktionary is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, and is written collaboratively by volunteers, dubbed "Wiktionarians". Its wiki software, MediaWiki, 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.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.

This process of composition is sometimes found in its incipient stage—a stage in which the component words are temporarily united to signify some unnamed object, and do not (from lack of frequent use) permanently cohere. But in the majority of inferior languages, the process of “agglutination,” as it is called, has gone far enough to produce considerable stability in the compound words: there is a manifest…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
States what Wiktionary is.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
Coinciding with the on-line transition, the second striking change is the extent to which research and education networks are becoming the new medium of scholarly communication. The existing Internet and the pending National Education and Research Network (NREN) represent the new meeting ground where scholars are going for bibliographic information, scholarly dialogue and feedback, the most current publications in…
Library of Congress, Workshop on Electronic Texts
States what Wiktionary is.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
To do so would often leave us without a word to express what is signified by a known word in some one or other of its senses: unless authors had an unlimited licence to coin new words, together with (what it would be more difficult to assume) unlimited power of making readers understand them. Nor would it be wise in a writer, on a subject involving so much of abstraction, to deny himself the advantage derived from…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic
States what Wiktionary is.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader

Philosophers who discussed Wiktionary

Foucault's Pendulum

Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Consequentialism.

Explore Wiktionary in the interactive graph →