Hello, and welcome! Wiktionary is amultilingualfreedictionary, being written collaboratively on this website by people from around the world. Entries may beedited by anyone!
You are reading theEnglish version of this multilingualdictionary of all languages, in which all words of all languages are explained in English, in adescriptivist (notprescriptivist) way. In the left sidebar, you will find links toother language versions of Wiktionary, in which the definitions are presented in other languages; each Wiktionary has a language code in its URL that designates which language it uses for its explanations.
Designed as the lexical companion toWikipedia, the encyclopedia project, Wiktionary has grown beyond a standard dictionary and now includes athesaurus, arhyme guide,phrasebooks, language statistics and extensive appendices. We aim to include not only the definition of a word, but also enough information to really understand it. Thus,etymologies, pronunciations, sample quotations, synonyms, antonyms, translations, spelling variants, non-standard spellings, etc., are included.
Wiktionary is awiki, which means that you can edit it, and all the content is dual-licensed under both theCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License and theGNU Free Documentation License. Before you contribute, you may wish to read through some of ourHelp pages, and bear in mind that we do things quite differently from other wikis. In particular, we have strictlayout conventions andinclusion criteria. Learn how tostart a page, how toedit entries, experiment in thesandbox and visit ourCommunity Portal to see how you can participate in the development of Wiktionary.
We have created8,477,811 entries since starting in December 2002, and we’re still growing.
People like you are very active in building this project. While you are reading this, someone is likely editing one of our entries. Many knowledgeable people are already at work, but everybody is welcome!
Contributing does not requirelogging in, but we would prefer that you do, as it facilitates the administration of this site. (Note that logging in also prevents the IP address of your computer from being displayed in thepage history.)
You can dive in right now and add or alter a definition, add example sentences, or help us to format or categorize entries properly. You can evencreate a page for a missing term. Please feel free tobe bold in editing pages!
How could allowing everyone to edit produce a high-quality product instead of total disorder? Because most people want to help, and keeping it open to everyone creates the potential for making many good and ever-improving entries. Records are kept of all changes, so even unhelpful edits can easily be reverted by other users. To use a now-famous catchphrase, in essence: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”
To start, users might want to use the ‘Recent changes’ or ‘Random page’ link (found in the navigation box elsewhere on this page), to get an idea of the kinds of pages you can find here. (It might be surprising how many non-English words are entered here!)
One important thing you should know is that we have borrowed from our sister projectWikipedia somecultural norms you should respect:
However, there are also some differences between Wikipedia and Wiktionary. If you already have some experience with editing Wikipedia, then you may find ourguide for Wikipedia users useful as a quick introduction.
More introductory information and descriptions of community norms are on the following pages:
For more policy and style guidelines or guidance, see ourHelp:Contents orCommunity Portal.
