Python module with access to english dictionaries including definitions of words [closed]

Answer 1

The python NLTK has a WordNet interface which is exactly what you're looking for. http://www.nltk.org/howto/wordnet.html

Edit: OP did not specify his request for common words, thus ruling out WordNet, until after I posted this answer. Since this answer has upvotes anyways, I'll leave it here.

Answer 2

Wordnik seems to have quite a nice API, and a nice-looking Python module too. It has definitions, example sentences, etc. so you should be covered. It does also have common words like "how", "should", and "could."

Answer 3

What about this. You'll need to write your own parser, but that should be fairly trivial given how the data is formatted.

Answer 4

Instead of a module, you can rely other offline/online sources like xml,json,api etc.

1. https://github.com/adambom/dictionary [json file]

2. http://dictionary-api.cambridge.org [REST api]

3. http://glosbe.com/a-api [REST api]

4. http://developer.oxforddictionaries.com/developer-resources/api-reference-guide/intro-using-the-oxford-dictionaries-api/ [REST api]

5. http://www.ibiblio.org/webster/ [XML, open source]

Answer 5

Note that while WordNet does not have all English words, what about the Oxford English Dictionary? (http://developer.oxforddictionaries.com/). Depending on the scope of your project, it could be a killer API.

Have you tried looking at Grady Ward's Moby? [link] (http://icon.shef.ac.uk/Moby/).

You could add it as a lexicon in NLTK (see notes on "Loading your own corpus" in Section 2.1).

from nltk.corpus import PlaintextCorpusReader
corpus_root = '/usr/share/dict'
wordlists = PlaintextCorpusReader(corpus_root, '.*')

Or:

from nltk.corpus import BracketParseCorpusReader
corpus_root = r"C:\corpora\penntreebank\parsed\mrg\wsj"
file_pattern = r".*/wsj_.*\.mrg"
ptb = BracketParseCorpusReader(corpus_root, file_pattern)