Wiktionary is a Wikimedia Foundation project intended to be a free wiki dictionary (including thesaurus and lexicon) in almost every language. It is a sister project to Wikipedia.
Mission
Wiktionary serves to:
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 March 2006, the English Wiktionary has more than 120,000 entries, athough in early 2006 it was surpassed by the French Wiktionary, which now has more than 150,000 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 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 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
See also
External links
Look up
Wiktionary in
Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
