 | |
Type of site | Dictionary |
|---|---|
| Available in |
|
| Dissolved | 26 August 2022; 2 years ago (2022-08-26) |
| Owner | Dictionary.com |
| Created by | Oxford University Press |
| URL | www formerlywww |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | None |
| Current status | Offline |
Lexico was a dictionary website that provided a collection of English and Spanish dictionaries produced byOxford University Press (OUP), thepublishing house of theUniversity of Oxford. While the dictionary content onLexico came from OUP, this website was operated byDictionary.com, whose eponymous website hosts dictionaries by other publishers such asRandom House. The website was closed and redirected to Dictionary.com on 26 August 2022.
Before the Lexico site was launched, theOxford Dictionary of English andNew Oxford American Dictionary were hosted by OUP's own websiteOxford Dictionaries Online (ODO), later known asOxford Living Dictionaries. The dictionaries' definitions have also appeared inGoogle definition search and theDictionary application onmacOS, among others, licensed through the Oxford DictionariesAPI.[1][2]
In the 2000s, OUP allowed access to content of theCompact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English on a website calledAskOxford.com.[3] In 2010,Oxford Dictionaries Online was launched under oxforddictionaries.com,[4] superseding the dictionary content ofAskOxford.com. Buyers of the third edition of theOxford Dictionary of English, also published in 2010, were granted a one-year subscription to the website's subscription content.[5] The website's English dictionaries incorporated content of theOxford Dictionary of English,New Oxford American Dictionary,Oxford Thesaurus of English, andOxford American Writer's Thesaurus. It also provided a Spanish monolingual dictionary and bilingual dictionaries between English and several languages.[6] As of June 2014[update], it was updated every three months.[7]
In 2014, OUP launchedOxford Global Languages, an initiative to build lexical resources (bilingual dictionaries) of the world's languages, starting withZulu andNorthern Sotho online dictionaries released in 2015.[8] In 2016, the free content ofOxford Dictionaries Online was rebranded asOxford Living Dictionaries, and the subscription content asOxford Dictionaries Premium.[9]
In June 2019, the free-of-charge dictionaries of English and Spanish were moved toLexico.com, a collaboration between OUP andDictionary.com, though with the lexicographic content continuing to be written solely by OUP staff. While the offer of the US English dictionary onOxford Living Dictionaries was terminated upon the migration toLexico except for words which the UK dictionary did not have entries for,[10][11] the US dictionary became fully available again onLexico in early 2020.[12] "Lexico" was itself part of the former name of the company Dictionary.com, Lexico Publishing Group, LLC.[13]
In March 2020, the remainingOxford Living Dictionaries websites, which hosted dictionaries made in the Global Languages programme, were closed. A statement from OUP said, "Rather than offering a dictionary website for every digitally under-resourced language, we will facilitate third parties to build products and services that best serve the needs of each individual language community. Our efforts will be focused on creating and providing the data that these third parties need."[14] At the time of the closure, they hosted dictionaries of Zulu, Northern Sotho,Malay,Urdu,Tswana,Indonesian,Romanian,Latvian,Swahili,Hindi,Tamil,Gujarati,Tatar,Xhosa,Southern Quechua,Tajik,Tok Pisin,Turkmen,Telugu, andGreek.[15]
On 26 August 2022,Lexico was closed and redirected toDictionary.com.[16]Oxford Dictionaries Premium was still available.[17]
TheOxford English Dictionary (OED) is a subscription service, whileLexico used the Oxford DictionariesAPI[18] to offer more modern versions of theOxford Dictionary of English andNew Oxford American Dictionary to users for free. TheOED described its difference fromOxford Dictionaries, the predecessor toLexico, as follows:
The dictionary content in Oxford Dictionaries focuses on current English and includes modern meanings and uses of words. Where words have more than one meaning, the most important and common meanings in modern English are given first, and less common and more specialist or technical uses are listed below. TheOED, on the other hand, is a historical dictionary and it forms a record of all the core words and meanings in English over more than 1,000 years, from Old English to the present day, and including many obsolete and historical terms. Meanings are ordered chronologically in theOED, according to when they were first recorded in English ...[19]