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Is there any free dictionary API that doesn't require API keys, and allows you to choose between multiple source and destination languages (as many as possible, at least English, German, Spanish, French...)?

Randall Ma
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Ognjen
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3 Answers3

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You can try http://glosbe.com/a-api , it's big -- almost all languages covered. It allows you to access data in JSON/JSONP/XML. There is some limit set for users without key, but you can overcome it by using JSONP on your client side.

Piotr
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I would think that Wiktionary (the dictionary from the folks that originally built Wikipedia) would fit the bill nicely.

API documentation for Wiktionary: http://en.wiktionary.org/w/api.php

Dan Esparza
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    Sadly, everything based on Mediawiki (the most popular wikis) is not designed to be computer readable. It's quite the screw up by the designers of the system. – cangrejo Jan 07 '14 at 17:25
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    Hmmm ... looking at the API docs at the link I gave, it looks like one of the parameters is 'format'. Apparently you can get output in json, jsonfm, php, phpfm, wddx, wddxfm, xml, xmlfm, yaml, yamlfm, rawfm, txt... and more. I'm not sure what you mean by 'not designed to be computer readable' if you're referring to something other than returned output format. – Dan Esparza Jan 07 '14 at 21:00
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    Yes, you can retrieve a JSON, but the content of the page itself is not in JSON format. It's the value of an attribute called "*" and it's usually a plethora of very hard to parse content. The problem is that the API is for all wikis, and all of them are different, so the content can't be easily standardized to make it computer-readable. It's a shame, because that could be an amazing resource. I hope someone does it in the future. – cangrejo Jan 08 '14 at 11:50
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    I agree with the above comments. I've just spent a couple of days trying to parse the "*" attribute broncoAbierto is talking about. It's all a big mess. I've done some version eventually to parse English words definitions. Surprise, the German version has a different format. So I've abandoned this. Pretty sad, really. – mihai Oct 15 '14 at 13:08
  • @broncoAbierto -- so sorry to hear that. That stinks! – Dan Esparza Oct 15 '14 at 13:29
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Most API providers require registration to prevent denial of service attacks and other abuses. That being said, I did run across one that is available without registration:

Aonaware - This Web Service allows you to access dictionary definitions from the dict.org service.

Danny D'Amours
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