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Wiktionary is a Wikimedia Foundation project intended to be a free wiki dictionary (including thesaurus and lexicon) in every language. It is a sister project to Misplaced Pages.
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
It was set up 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 until May 1, 2004 when it switched to the current full URL. As of April 2006, the English Wiktionary has more than 130,000 entries, although in early 2006 it was surpassed by the French Wiktionary, which now has more than 165,000 entries. More than a dozen languages now have Wiktionaries containing at least 10,000 entries.
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 Misplaced Pages 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 is being used to move pages to uppercase as necessary.
WikiSaurus
WikiSaurus is a category in Wiktionary whose purpose is to serve as a thesaurus, including a thesaurus of slang words.
See "Creating a WikiSaurus entry" for the structure of wikiSaurus entries. An example of a well-formatted entry would be the "wiktionary: WikiSaurus: insane" page.
References
- "Wiktionary". Top 101 Web Sites. PC Magazine. Retrieved 2005-12-16.
See also
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External links
- Wiktionary
- Wiktionary's Multilingual Statistics
- Wikimedia's page on Wiktionary (including list of all existing Wiktionaries)
- The Wiktionary Widget for the Mac OS X Dashboard which pulls up Wiktionary articles.