Wiktionary

Wiktionary (whose name is a blend of the words wiki and dictionary) is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of all words in all languages. It is available in 172 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 words from many languages, and some editions offer additional information typically found in thesauri and lexicons. The English Wiktionary includes a Wikisaurus (thesaurus) of synonyms of various words.

Wiktionary data are frequently used in various natural language processing tasks.

History and development

Wiktionary was brought online on December 12, 2002, following a proposal by Daniel Alston and an idea by Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia. On March 28, 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 domain name (wiktionary.wikipedia.org) until May 1, 2004, when it switched to the current domain name.As of May 2009, Wiktionary features well over 5 million entries across its 272 language editions. By August 2015, the total entry count was over 15 million. The largest of the language editions is the English Wiktionary, with over 4.5 million entries, followed by the Malagasy Wiktionary with over 3.9 million entries and the French Wiktionary with over 2.8 million. Thirty six Wiktionary language editions now contain over 100,000 entries each.