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 inthesauri.
Wiktionary was brought online on December 12, 2002,[2] following a proposal by Daniel Alston and an idea byLarry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia.[3] On March 28, 2004, the first non-English Wiktionaries were initiated inFrench andPolish. Wiktionaries in numerous other languages have since been started. Wiktionary was hosted on a temporarydomain name (wiktionary.wikipedia.org) until May 1, 2004, when it switched to the current domain name.[a] As of July 2021[ref], Wiktionary features over 30 million articles (and even more entries) across its editions.[4] The largest of the language editions is the English Wiktionary, with over 7.5 million entries, followed by theFrench Wiktionary with over 4.7 million and theMalagasy Wiktionary with over 3.5 million entries. Forty-three Wiktionary language editions contain over 100,000 entries each.[b]
The use ofbots to generate large numbers of articles is visible as "growth spurts" in this graph of article counts at the largest eight Wiktionary editions. (Data as of December 2009[update])
Many of the definitions in the project's largest language editions were created bybots that found creative ways to generate entries or (rarely) automatically imported thousands of entries from previously published dictionaries. Seven of the 18 bots registered at the English Wiktionary in 2007[c] created 163,000 of the entries there.[5]
Another bot, "ThirdPersBot", was responsible for the addition of a number of third-personconjugations that would not have received their own entries in standard dictionaries; for instance, it defined "smoulders" as the "third-person singular simple present form ofsmoulder." Of the 1,269,938 definitions the English Wiktionary provides for 996,450 English words, 478,068 are "form of" definitions of this kind.[6] This means that even without such entries, its coverage of English is significantly larger than that of major monolingual print dictionaries.Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary, for instance, has 475,000 entries (with many additional embedded headwords); theOxford English Dictionary has 615,000 headwords, but includesMiddle English as well, for which the English Wiktionary has an additional34,234 gloss definitions. Detailedstatistics exist to show how many entries of various kinds exist.
The English Wiktionary does not rely on bots to the extent that some other editions do. TheFrench andVietnamese Wiktionaries, for example, imported large sections of the Free Vietnamese Dictionary Project (FVDP), which provides free content bilingual dictionaries to and from Vietnamese.[d] These imported entries make up virtually all of the Vietnamese edition's contents. Like the English edition, the French Wiktionary has imported approximately 20,000 entries from theUnihan database ofCJK characters. The French Wiktionary grew rapidly in 2006 thanks in a large part to bots copying many entries from old, freely licensed dictionaries, such as the eighth edition of theDictionnaire de l'Académie française (1935, around 35,000 words), and using bots to add words from other Wiktionary editions with French translations. TheRussian edition grew by nearly 80,000 entries as "LXbot" added boilerplate entries (with headings, but without definitions) for words in English andGerman.[7]
As of July 2021, the English Wiktionary has over 791,870gloss definitions and over 1,269,938 total definitions (including different forms) for English entries alone, with a total of over 9,928,056 definitions across all languages.[8]
Wiktionary has historically lacked a uniform logo across its numerous language editions. Some editions use logos that depict a dictionary entry about the term "Wiktionary", based on the previous English Wiktionary logo, which was designed by Brooke Vibber, aMediaWiki developer.[9] Because a purely textual logo must vary considerably from language to language, a four-phase contest to adopt a uniform logo was held at the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki from September to October 2006.[e] Some communities adopted the winning entry by the user known as "Smurrayinchester", a 3×3 grid of wooden tiles, each bearing a character from a different writing system. However, the poll did not see as much participation from the Wiktionary community as some community members had hoped, and a number of the larger wikis ultimately kept their textual logos.[e]
In April 2009, the issue was resurrected with a new contest. This time, a depiction by "AAEngelman" of an open hardbound dictionary won a head-to-head vote against the 2006 logo, but the process to refine and adopt the new logo then stalled.[10] In the following years, some wikis replaced their textual logos with one of the two newer logos. In 2012, 55 wikis that had been using the English Wiktionary logo received localized versions of the 2006 design by "Smurrayinchester".[f] In July 2016, the English Wiktionary adopted a variant of this logo.[11] As of 4 July 2016[update], 135 wikis, representing 61% of Wiktionary's entries, use a logo based on the 2006 design by "Smurrayinchester", 33 wikis (36%) use a textual logo, and three wikis (3%) use the 2009 design by "AAEngelman".[12]
Multi-lingual
As of October 2025, there are Wiktionary sites for 198 languages of which 174 are active and 24 are closed.[1] The active sites have 46,483,252 articles, and the closed sites have 339 articles.[13] There are 7,654,008 registered users of which 8,913 are recently active.[13]
The top ten Wiktionary language projects by mainspace article count:[13]
For a complete list with totals see Wikimedia Statistics:[14]
Critical reception
This section'sfactual accuracy may be compromised due to out-of-date information. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information.(May 2013)
Critical reception of Wiktionary has been mixed. In 2006,Jill Lepore wrote in the article "Noah's Ark" forThe New Yorker,[g]
There's no show of hands atWiktionary. There's not even an editorial staff. "Be your own lexicographer!", might beWiktionary's motto. Who needs experts? Why pay good money for a dictionary written by lexicographers when we could cobble one together ourselves?Wiktionary isn't so muchrepublican ordemocratic asMaoist. And it's only as good as thecopyright-expired books from which it pilfers.
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.[citation needed]
References in other publications are fleeting and part of larger discussions of Wikipedia, not progressing beyond a definition, although David Brooks inThe Nashua Telegraph described it as "wild and woolly".[16] One of the impediments to independent coverage of Wiktionary is the continuing confusion that it is merely an extension of Wikipedia.[h]
The measure of correctness of the inflections for a subset of the Polish words in the English Wiktionary showed that this grammatical data is very stable (a study showed that only 131 out of 4,748 Polish words have had their inflection data corrected).[17]
JWKTL (Java Wiktionary Library) :[29] provides access to English Wiktionary and German Wiktionary dumps via a JavaWiktionary API.[30] The data includes language, parts of speech, definitions, quotations, semantic relations, etymologies and translations. JWKTL is distributed under theApache License.
wikokit :[31] theparser of English Wiktionary and Russian Wiktionary.[32] The parsed data includes language, parts of speech, definitions, quotations,[33][j] semantic relations[34] and translations. This is amulti-licensedopen-source software.
Construction ofmachine-readable dictionary by the parser NULEX, which integrates open linguistic resources: English Wiktionary,WordNet, andVerbNet.[37] The parser NULEXscrapes English Wiktionary for tense information (verbs), plural form and parts of speech (nouns).
Speech recognition andsynthesis, where Wiktionary was used to automatically create pronunciation dictionaries.[38] Word-pronunciation pairs were retrieved from 6 Wiktionary language editions (Czech, English, French,Spanish, Polish, and German). Pronunciations are in terms of theInternational Phonetic Alphabet.[k] TheASR system based on English Wiktionary has the highest word error rate, where each thirdphoneme has to be changed.[40]
Text simplification. Medero &Ostendorf[44] assessed vocabulary difficulty (reading level detection) with the help of Wiktionary data. Properties of words extracted from Wiktionary entries (definition length andPOS, sense, and translation counts) were investigated. Medero & Ostendorf expected that
(1) very common words will be more likely to have multiple parts of speech,
(2) common words will be more likely to have multiple senses,
(3) common words will be more likely to have been translated into multiple languages. These features extracted from Wiktionary entries were useful in distinguishing word types that appear inSimple English Wikipedia articles from words that only appear in the Standard English comparable articles.
A page called "Wikidata:Lexicographical data" was started in 2018 to provide structured data support to Wiktionaries. It stores word data of all languages in a machine readable data model, under a dedicated "Lexeme" namespace in Wikidata. As of October 2021, the project has amassed over 600,000 lexeme entries of various languages.[47]
^In this citation, the author refers to Wiktionary as part of the Wikipedia site:Adapted from an article by Naomi DeTullio (2006)."Wikis for Librarians"(PDF).NETLS News #142. Northeast Texas Library System. p. 15. Archived fromthe original(PDF newsletter) on June 5, 2007. RetrievedApril 21, 2007.
^Quotations are extracted only from Russian Wiktionary.[33]
^If there are several IPA notations on a Wiktionary page – either for different languages or for pronunciation variants, then the first pronunciation was extracted.[39]
^David Brooks, "Online, interactive encyclopedia not just for geeks anymore, because everyone seems to need it now, more than ever!"The Nashua Telegraph (August 4, 2004)
Krizhanovsky, Andrew (2010). "Transformation of Wiktionary entry structure into tables and relations in a relational database schema".arXiv:1011.1368 [cs].
Krizhanovsky, Andrew (2010). "The comparison of Wiktionary thesauri transformed into the machine-readable format".arXiv:1006.5040 [cs].
Li, Shen; Graça, Joao V.; Taskar, Ben (2012)."Wiki-ly supervised part-of-speech tagging"(PDF).Proceedings of the 2012 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning. Jeju Island, Korea: Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 1389–1398. Archived fromthe original(PDF) on May 22, 2013. RetrievedMay 10, 2013.
Lepore, Jill (November 6, 2006)."Noah's Ark".The New Yorker (Abstract).Archived from the original on July 6, 2014. RetrievedApril 21, 2007.
Lin, Feiyu; Krizhanovsky, Andrew (2011). "Multilingual ontology matching based on Wiktionary data accessible via SPARQL endpoint".Proc. of the 13th Russian Conference on Digital Libraries RCDL'2011. Voronezh, Russia. pp. 19–26.arXiv:1109.0732.Bibcode:2011arXiv1109.0732L.
McFate, Clifton J.; Forbus, Kenneth D. (2011)."NULEX: an open-license broad coverage lexicon"(PDF).The 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Conference. Portland, Oregon, US: The Association for Computer Linguistics. pp. 363–367.ISBN978-1-932432-88-6.Archived(PDF) from the original on October 11, 2017. RetrievedMay 10, 2013.
Otte, Pim; Tyers, F. M. (2011)."Rapid rule-based machine translation between Dutch and Afrikaans"(PDF). In Forcada, Mikel L.; Depraetere, Heidi; Vandeghinste, Vincent (eds.).16th Annual Conference of the European Association of Machine Translation, EAMT11. Leuven, Belgium. pp. 153–160. Archived fromthe original(PDF) on February 25, 2021. RetrievedMay 10, 2013.
Smirnov A, Levashova T, Karpov A, Kipyatkova I, Ronzhin A, Krizhanovsky A, Krizhanovsky N (2012). "Analysis of the quotation corpus of the Russian Wiktionary".Research in Computing Science.56:101–112.arXiv:2002.00734.CiteSeerX10.1.1.694.9627.doi:10.13053/rcs-56-1-11 (inactive July 12, 2025).S2CID10726045.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of July 2025 (link)
