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...)?
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2The Merriam-Webster Dictionary API is free as long as it is for non-commercial use, usage does not exceed 1000 queries per day http://www.dictionaryapi.com/. – Mohammed H Mar 14 '14 at 08:56
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I made some simple API for free translation https://github.com/Sangdol/free-and-slow-google-translate-api – Sanghyun Lee May 10 '14 at 07:41
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2@Ognjen did you ever solve or find a online dictionary API? – Nomis Nov 13 '15 at 12:05
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1You can try transltr.org it provides free translation api, requires no registration. – user2412672 Aug 27 '16 at 07:56
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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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Found this answer very helpful for my purposes, but being new I don't understand how you overcome the limitation with JSONP, if it's not too much trouble, would you care to elaborate? – UrbKr Dec 06 '13 at 12:01
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1Currently API is in it's alpha version and everything described on this page is a subject to change. – solidfox Apr 19 '16 at 14:25
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1Currently API doesn't work as described. Be requesting for JSON format it delivers HTML-Content. So I'm unable to create an API key – palik Jun 05 '18 at 16:47
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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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11Sadly, 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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1Hmmm ... 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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24Yes, 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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3I 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
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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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2This looks nice. But I have two questions: Is it free to use it in my commercial application? Is there any API for it? – Bagusflyer Aug 27 '14 at 09:37
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