Wiktionary

Wiktionary is a Wikimedia Foundation project intended to be a free wiki dictionary (hence: Wiktionary) (including thesaurus and lexicon) in every language. It is a Sister projects to Wikipedia. It is located at wiktionary.org.

Mission

Wiktionary serves to:

Explain the meanings of words, multi-word terms, idiomatic phrases, and abbreviations.
Act as a thesaurus by showing synonyms and related terms.
Explain etymologies of words.
Translate words from one language to another.

History

Wiktionary was brought online on December 12, 2002 following a proposal by Daniel Alston. On March 29, 2004 the first non-English Wiktionaries were initiated in French and Polish. Wiktionaries in numerous other languages have since been started. Wiktionary was hosted on a temporary URL (wiktionary.wikipedia.org) until May 1, 2004 when it switched to the current full URL.Wiktionary's current URL is www.wiktionary.org. As of May 2006, the English Wiktionary has more than 140,000 entries, although in early 2006 it was surpassed by the French Wiktionary, which now has more than 175,000 entries. More than a dozen languages now have Wiktionaries containing at least 10,000 entries.

Top Ten Wiktionaries

No.	Language	Language (local)	Wiki	Good	Total	Edits	Admins	Users	Images	Updated
1	French language	French language	fr	193102	218151	1049861	10	1908	15	2006-06-17 18:11:41
2	English language	English language	en	151513	254592	1036319	38	15234	409	2006-06-17 18:11:42
3	Chinese language	Chinese language	zh	90598	105086	293704	6	1160	107	2006-06-17 18:11:49
4	Ido language	Ido language	io	57409	93869	185938	1	61	3	2006-06-17 18:11:48
5	Polish language	Polish language	pl	41975	83039	234285	11	739	106	2006-06-17 18:11:42
6	Italian language	Italian language	it	40930	47561	137446	6	748	105	2006-06-17 18:11:43
7	Greek language	Greek language	el	31171	40876	65644	3	105	11	2006-06-17 18:12:16
8	Hungarian language	Hungarian language	hu	25182	37803	92598	2	276	35	2006-06-17 18:12:09
9	German language	German language	de	24940	37419	297623	13	4057	22	2006-06-17 18:11:56
10	Bulgarian language	Bulgarian language	bg	23933	893047	927805	4	289	20	2006-06-17 18:11:55

Multilingualism

Unlike many dictionaries, which are monolingual or bilingual, Wiktionary is multilingual, meaning that the goal is to define every word from all known languages in every other language, as well as in the original language itself. For example, the English Wiktionary is written in English but accepts entries for words from all languages. The French Wiktionary can also have entries for all those same words, but the entries are written in French.

Comparison to other sister projects

One difference between Wiktionary and Wikipedia is that pages beginning with upper- and lowercase letters can refer to different things. For example, the entries on lowercase " i" and uppercase " I" are distinct. All of the existing entries in the English Wiktionary were converted to lowercase automatically in mid-2005; manual intervention was used to move pages to uppercase (or split entries) as necessary. Links from Wikipedia to Wiktionary must be made with care, as it may be relevant to link to a lowercase entry, link to an uppercase entry, link to an entry with diacritics or link to multiple entries.

WikiSaurus

WikiSaurus is a category in the English Wiktionary whose purpose is to serve as a thesaurus, including a thesaurus of slang words.

See Help: Creating a WikiSaurus entry for the structure of wikiSaurus entries. An example of a well-formatted entry would be the "WikiSaurus:insane" page.

References

External links

Wiktionary
- Main Page
Wiktionary: Multilingual statistics
Wiktionary (including list of all existing Wiktionaries)
The Wiktionary Widget for the Mac OS X Dashboard which pulls up Wiktionary articles.

2002 establishments | Online dictionaries | Educational websites | Wikimedia projects