Wordset Dictionary

From 2015-2017, Wordset.org provided a public interface for anyone to help collaborate on the world's first open source, collaborative dictionary.

However, due to... well, cough lack of interest... we decided to shutdown the project.

Here we are providing the final, most up-to-date release of the Wordset Dictionary. I'll answer some questions inline about the data and what you can do about it.

How can I read it?

The data folder contains a file for every letter, and one for 'misc' (that includes emoji!).

Each file has a big JSON object keyed by the words themselves. A sample entry might look like this:

{
    "largely": {
        "word": "largely",
        "wordset_id": "54bd55df7265742391cf0000",
        "meanings": [{
            "id": "54bd55df7265742391d10000",
            "def": "in large part",
            "speech_part": "adverb",
            "synonyms": ["mostly", "for the most part"]
        }, {
            "id": "54bd55df7265742391d20000",
            "def": "on a large scale",
            "example": "the sketch was so largely drawn that you could see it from the back row",
            "speech_part": "adverb"
        }]
    }
}

Hopefully, most of it is pretty self-explainatory.

Here's another entry that includes some labels on the meanings.

{
    "lindy": {
        "word": "lindy",
        "wordset_id": "54bd567d72657423915c0d02",
        "labels": [{
            "name": "American",
            "is_dialect": true
        }],
        "meanings": [{
            "id": "54bd567d72657423915e0d02",
            "def": "an energetic American dance that was popular in the 1930s, probably named for the aviator Charles Lindbergh",
            "example": "Can you lindy?",
            "speech_part": "noun",
            "synonyms": ["lindy hop"]
        }],
        "editors": ["lefurjah"],
        "contributors": ["odd_bloke", "zellerpress", "malrase", "hcatlin"]
    }
}

What can I use it for?

Anything! We're giving this to the world. If you need a basic english Dictionary then no sense in paying for fees, this is definitely good enough for almost all uses.

We'd LOVE to see adapters for different languages using this. Or, if you have an idea of something you want to do, hit us up! We're still around on the internet and happy to help!

Is it Complete?

Alas, nothing is ever complete. However, we started the project by utilizing the Princeton WordNet project, and then made many thousands of modifications of that. But, with 177k meanings, and 63,936 manual edits by volunteers it's as complete as it will be.

What about WordNet?

Most open source projects use WordNet for simple dictionary usages, but we have vastly improved and modified that original source to be something much more human friendly.

Also, WordNet takes a long time to grok, this is some pretty human-readable stuff.

Did I mention that this is all in JSON?

Is It Racist/Sexist/Whatever?

We've had several projects on the site to try and mitigate some of the more, uh, problematic entries. However, we didn't get to everything. WordNet, the original source of the material, sourced their data from many different sources. As their goal was to power machine learning and word-maps, the definitions were often not handled with much care.

So, you can definitely find some stuff in here that we should update. In fact, it's not too late... feel free to put in a PR if you want to edit something. Can't guarantee we'll have a lot of time to check it out, but at least it will be something!

Gender Neutral

After several months of working on the dictionary, we realized how many stupidly and uselessly gendered example sentences there were. We have several write-ups about the project, but we decided to go through every single sentence that included a gendered pronoun and re-write it.

We found this drastically improved the quality of the content and in almost every case was a huge step up. "They went to the store" instead of "She went to the store".

Editorial Guidelines

I've included the original editorial guidelines in Guidelines.md, but note that since we didn't edit every word in the dictionary, that not all of them are strictly followed.

Contributors

Wordset was founded by Hampton Lintorn Catlin and Michael Lintorn Catlin , and we were joined by Justin Lefurjah in making this project a reality.

Justin, in fact, was by far our largest contributor. He was personally responsible for 97 new words and 7,460 edits!

Also, we had a TON of volunteers, who worked for hours and hours improving this dictionary.

Special thanks to msingle, sabreuse, bryanedu, zellerpress, luxfactaest, lauradhahn, odd_bloke, musicchild, jessecurry, joshuabriggs, brilliantskip, and luciankahn for all their hard work!.