It’s always surprised me that search engines don’t point to Wiktionary by default, and in fact usually don’t show it in search results on the first page.
Over the years, it has gotten better and better and now is an almost universal resource on all word forms. You see a word and don’t know what it means? You put it in the search bar at Wiktionary and the site will figure out it is the second person aorist of the passive voice of the Ancient Greek verb kataminomai, used only between the second and third centuries in the Hellenistic colonies of Mars. Made up example, of course, but the quality of the information is insane.
Also Wiktionary imported the whole Webster dictionary from early 20th century sometime in the beginning of their operation, and apparently Webster was a fan of thoroughly describing each of the twenty meanings of a word. Which tradition continues in Wiktionary to this day — instead of giving three-word descriptions for two or three meanings tops, as other online dictionaries do.
My one complaint is that the thesaurus at Wiktionary is so-so, being exhaustive only for things like euphemisms, which naturally have many synonyms. In most cases, Thesaurus.com is a better resource.
Just a reminder that
https://www.wiktionary.org/
Exists, and is part of the Wikimedia foundation
It’s always surprised me that search engines don’t point to Wiktionary by default, and in fact usually don’t show it in search results on the first page.
Over the years, it has gotten better and better and now is an almost universal resource on all word forms. You see a word and don’t know what it means? You put it in the search bar at Wiktionary and the site will figure out it is the second person aorist of the passive voice of the Ancient Greek verb kataminomai, used only between the second and third centuries in the Hellenistic colonies of Mars. Made up example, of course, but the quality of the information is insane.
Double reminder that local offline copies of wiktionary.org dictionaries are available in Stardict, Tabfile and Kindle formats for download here: https://github.com/Vuizur/Wiktionary-Dictionaries
Reminder? This is how I found out at all!
Also Wiktionary imported the whole Webster dictionary from early 20th century sometime in the beginning of their operation, and apparently Webster was a fan of thoroughly describing each of the twenty meanings of a word. Which tradition continues in Wiktionary to this day — instead of giving three-word descriptions for two or three meanings tops, as other online dictionaries do.
My one complaint is that the thesaurus at Wiktionary is so-so, being exhaustive only for things like euphemisms, which naturally have many synonyms. In most cases, Thesaurus.com is a better resource.