Does anyone know of a webservice for looking up definitions of words that would be able to return results in JSON?

Question

I found http://words.bighugelabs.com/api.php but nothing like this for definitions/dictionary.

Ideally I'd grab a dictionary file and build my own API for this, but this is for a demo and we need something short-term that can be called from within a javascript function.

Answer 1

wiktionary.org provides an API for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=search&srsearch=Television&format=json

gives back

    {
       "query": {"searchinfo": {"totalhits": 208862},
       "search": [{ 
           "ns": 0, 
           "title": "Television", 
           "snippet": "<span class='searchmatch'>Television<\/span> (TV) is a widely used telecommunication  medium  for transmitting and receiving moving images , either monochromatic  (\"black  <b>...<\/b> ",
           "size": 28228, 
           "wordcount": 3566, 
           "timestamp": "2009-10-02T15:09:56Z"},
...
       ]},
       "query-continue": {"search": {"sroffset":10}}
    }

Answer 2

I think this is what you are looking for

• bighugelabs API - Json fromat
• aonaware services - XML format

Answer 3

Not sure if it would fit your needs, but answers.com has webmaster tools that offer various services, including dictionary lookup. Don't know if any can be called from javascript.

Answer 4

At short notice you could set up a reverse-proxy on your server that lets you AJAX your favorite dictionary website and then 'scrape' the definitions from the document that is returned. It's obviously not a long term solution but for a one time thing, you probably won't get into trouble.

Answer 5

This is a web service and have several dictionaries:

http://services.aonaware.com/DictService/DictService.asmx

P.S. I did not notice the JSON part of your question.