Wiktionary

Wiktionary full URL is a sister project to Wikipedia intended to be a free wiki dictionary (thesaurus, lexicon therein) in every language. Following through with Daniel Alston's idea, it was set up on December 12, 2002. On March 29, 2004 the first multilingual Wiktionaries were developed in French and Polish. Other languages have been developed, and more are continually being developed. Wiktionary was hosted on a temporary URL until May 1, 2004 when it switched to the current full URL. In July 2005, the English Wiktionary had more than 76,000 entries.

Wiktionary can be used for:

• explaining meaning of words, terms and abbreviations
• finding synonyms for words as a thesaurus
• translating from one language to another

Unlike many dictionaries, which are monolingual or bilingual, Wiktionary is a multilingual and international dictionary, meaning that the goal is to cover every word from all known languages.

One difference between the Wiktionary and Wikipedia sites (at least for the English version) is that entries normally begin with a lowercase letter, and pages beginning with upper- and lowercase letters can refer to different things. As a simple example, the entries on lowercase i and uppercase I are distinct. All of the existing entries on the English Wiktionary were converted to lowercase automatically in mid-2005, and manual intervention is being used to move pages that need to be uppercase.

See also

• Wiktionary:Multilingual Statistics
• UrbanDictionary

External links

Look up Wiktionary in Wiktionary, the free dictionary

• Wiktionary
  • In English
• Wikimedia's wiktionary