Best Dictionary APIs That You Should Be Using Right Now

Do you want to learn how to integrate dictionary APIs into your application or software?

We got you covered.

First, let's dive into what dictionary APIs do.

What are Dictionary APIs?

Wouldn't it be great to have an API to always tell you the right spelling or correct definition or a word?

With dictionary APIs, you're set!

via GIPHY

Dictionary APIs allow developers to access some of the world’s most extensive libraries of word data in all different languages.

These APIs can allow you to integrate:

• word definitions
• synonyms
• translations
• and even audio pronunciations into your application.

What is the best dictionary API?

After reviewing over 38 dictionary APIs, we found these 5 APIs to be the very best and worth mentioning:

• WordsAPI
• Urban Dictionary API
• Twinword Word Dictionary API
• Tagdef API
• Linguatools English Collocations API

Our Top 5 Best Dictionary APIs for 2021

Our Top Picks for Best Dictionary APIs

Here are some of the top dictionary-related REST APIs for developers we thought were worth mentioning:

1. WordsAPI

Let's check out Words API.

Here's a description from their site:

An API for the English Language
Find definitions, related words, and more, with a simple to use RESTful API.

The Words API allows you to integrate a wide range of information about English words, such as:

• definitions,
• syllables,
• pronunciation,
• synonyms,
• rhymes,
• usage frequency,
• and relationships between words.

Popular endpoints include:

• Entails, which returns other words implied by the original word,
• and Examples, which provides examples of how the word is used.

Not only does the Words API provide definitions, but also returns:

• usage
• related terms
• category
• region
• and more useful metadata.

So let's take a closer look and see how to use the Words API:

1. Register and login to RapidAPI.com
2. Search for the WordsAPI & click on the "Pricing" tab
3. Select a pricing tier (the basic plan is free up to 2500 calls/day).
4. Click on the "functions" tab & connect to any of the endpoints you find useful.

Words API Pricing

The Words API offers plans ranging from a free basic plan to a high-volume Mega-plan.

Example prices include:

• Free up to 2,500 requests per day, plus $0.004 per extra request
• $10 up to 25,000 requests per day, plus $0.003 per extra request
• $89 up to 500,000 requests per day, plus $0.001 per extra request

Learn how to use the WordsAPI with JavaScript here.

Popularity Score: 9.9/10

---

Best ForAll Around Information

Connect to API

2. Urban Dictionary API

Have you ever wondered the meaning of rpp?

Urban Dictionary is an online dictionary that provides definitions for slang words and phrases, based on the crowdsourced information.

Want to know a secret?

The Urban Dictionary API is an unofficial, “secret” API for accessing the Urban Dictionary database.

shhhh.

Here's how you can utilize the Urban Dictionary API to become an expert in slang:

1. Sign in to RapidAPI
2. Connect to the Urban Dictionary API
3. Enter a keyword
4. Click "TEST Function"

and - you're done!

Now you're an urban slang master.

And get this:

Urban Dictionary API Pricing

The Urban Dictionary API is a free dictionary API.

So start learning the newest and coolest slang words to get out of your mondaze.

Popularity Score: 9.7/10

---

Best ForMultilingual Information

Connect to API

3. Twinword Word Dictionary

Next up is Word Dictionary API developed by Twinword.

Twinword develops multiple APIs for analyzing and understanding human inputs and online behavior patterns.

The Word Dictionary API provides:

• definitions,
• associations,
• examples,
• and more for an extensive dictionary of words.

Popular endpoints include:

• Definition, which returns the definitions for a specific word,
• and Difficulty, which provides the difficulty level for a specific word.

So let's begin...

Here's an example of how to call the Word Dictionary API:

1. Register or sign into your RapidAPI account.
2. Navigate to the Word Dictionary API by Twinword.
3. Click "Connect to API".
4. Select which endpoint you want to call.
5. Type the word or phrase that you want to call through the API.
6. Click on "TEST Function".

And that's it.

Twinword Word Dictionary API Pricing

The Word Dictionary API offers plans ranging from a free basic plan to a high-volume Ultra plan.

Example prices include:

• Free up to 10,000 requests per month, plus $0.003 per extra request
• $19 up to 125,000 requests per month, plus $0.001 per extra request
• $99 up to 750,000 requests per month, plus $0.001 per extra request

Popularity Score: 9.0/10

---

Best ForSlang & Colloquial Definitions

Connect to API

4. Tagdef

Ever seen a hashtag on Twitter or Facebook, and wondered what it was about?

The Tagdef API has got you covered.

The Tagdef API gives you access to the world’s largest hashtag dictionary, with more than 60,000 user-generated definitions for hashtags used on Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+.

Popular endpoints include:

• Get a list of definitions, which returns the top 5 definitions based on user popularity votes
• and Get top definition, which returns the top definition for a specific hashtag.

Here's how you can use the Tagdef API to get this data:

First, head over to the Tagdef API on RapidAPI and enter a hashtag.

For example, let's say you were interested in the "covfefe" hashtag meaning:

Just click "TEST Function" and voila:

The payload returns a short description of the hashtag and a URI.

Isn't that awesome?

Now, I know what your next question is...

Tagdef API Pricing

The Tagdef API is another free dictionary API

BUT

requires attribution that includes a clickable link.

See API documentation at https://blog.tagdef.com/tagdef-api/ for link specifications.

Popularity Score: 8,4/10

---

Best ForDefinitions, Associations & Examples

Connect to API

5. Linguatools English Collocations

The LinguaTools English Collocations API is an API that reads an inputted word and returns all the available collocations for that definition.

For example, if you were to run the word change through the API, you would get a response containing information about collocations like:

• to change name
• name change
• climate change
• to make change
• and etc...

Here's a quick screengrab:

This is a freemium based API that allows for 1000 free API calls per month before charging.

Popularity Score: 5.1/10

---

Best ForHashtags

Connect to API

Through RapidAPI, the following dictionary APIs are available through the following frameworks:

• NodeJS
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby
• Objective-C
• Java
• C# (.NET)
• cURL

Now that you've reviewed these top dictionary APIs, it's time to test them out.

But first, leave a comment below to let me know which API you're planning on using.

Ready to start using these dictionary APIs?

Head on over to RapidAPI.com and register for a free account to get started.

Summary: Best Dictionary APIs for Developers

Complete List of the Best Dictionary APIs

• LINK Bilingual Dictionary - LINK Bilingual Dictionary is a REST API offering bilingual dictionary translate on 20+ languages.
• Bad Word Filter - Detect and censor bad words, swear words and profanity in a given text. Currently works with an English only database which includes "leetspeak".
• Keyword Suggestion - Recommend keywords for SEO and SEM scored by relevance.
• Language Scoring - What's the difficulty level of this article? Evaluate the difficulty level of a word, sentence, or paragraph and compare it with another.
• Lemmatizer - "Dogs" to "dog", "abilities" to "ability". Get the root form of a word.
• Linguatools Conjugations - The Conjugation API looks up a word in a dictionary and returns all conjugated forms with the associated English tenses.
• Linguatools English Collocations - Looks up a word in a dictionary and returns all collocations
• linguatools translate - Looks up a word in a dictionary and returns all translations ordered by frequency. The API translates from and to German for the following languages: English, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, Italian, and Czech. Possibility to filter by a word class.
• MyMemory - Translation Memory - Get a better translation! MyMemory is the world's largest Translation Memory. It contains billions of words translated by professional translators. MyMemory will give you a machine translation (Google, Microsoft or our) only when a human translation is not available.
• Similar Words - The service returns similar words to words that you enter. It can be helpful for finding new keywords, adding tags, etc. Of particular use is the ability to take as input multiple words - for example, "apple pear" returns fruits, but "apple microsoft" returns tech companies.
• Spellcheck - Fix spelling mistakes with the opensource Spellcheck API. The dictionary is continually growing and becoming smarter.
• Summarization -Index -Summary -Part of Speech - Summarize the content of a web page. Returns a summary, the parts of speech for each sentence, the extracted HTML, and the content make up of the page.
• SYSTRAN.io - Translation and NLP - SYSTRAN.io platform is a collection of APIs for Translation, Multilingual Dictionary lookups, Natural Language Processing (Entity recognition, Morphological analysis, Part of Speech tagging, Language Identification…) and Text Extraction (from documents, audio files or images).
• Tagdef - Tagdef.com is the worlds largest hashtag dictionary. Use this api to access these definitions. The content is user-generated, and the directory currently contains over 60.000 definitions. The hashtags can have many definitions each, ordered by user-votes.
• Text Classification - Classify unstructured data such as articles or text into predefined categories.
• Text Similarity - Evaluate the similarity of two words, sentences, or paragraphs.
• TextAnalysis - TextAnalysis API provides customized Text Analysis,Text Mining and Text Processing Services like Text Summarization, Language Detection, Text Classification, Sentiment Analysis, Word Tokenize, Part-of-Speech(POS) Tagging, Named Entity Recognition(NER), Stemmer, Lemmatizer, Chunker, Parser, Key Phrase Extraction(Noun Phrase Extraction), Sentence Segmentation(Sentence Boundary Detection), Grammar Checker and other Text Analysis Tasks.
• Twinword Text Analysis Bundle - One API for all your text analysis needs. Sentiment Analysis, Topic Tagging, Lemmatizer, and much more. Various NLP tools all with one plan. Use natural language processing to analyze and understand human sentences.
• Urban Dictionary - Urban Dictionary is the dictionary you write. This is the unofficial secret API.
• Visual Context Graph - Build a graph with words connected to other words. Diagram information for visualizing concepts or mind maps.
• WikiSynonyms - This is a term synonym discovery service that exploits that structure of Wikipedia redirects to discover almost-equivalent terms. You can try terms like C++, or Hillary Clinton, or Mihapjungguk to see some of the results.
• Word Associations - What's another word for this word, phrase, or paragraph? More than just synonyms, related words too!
• Word Cloud - Generate great looking word clouds from text. Customize size, color and more.
• Word Dictionary - A dictionary and so much more! Rich information for a word with definitions, associations, examples, and much more.
• Word Quiz - Vocabulary test with levels and exam-specific words (SAT, GMAT, etc). Customized word association quiz for game and e-learning software.
• Words - The WebKnox Words API lets you have your way with words. Get the singular, plural, present, past, past participle, or synonyms of a word.
• WordsAPI - Words API lets you retrieve information about English words, including definitions, synonyms, rhymes, pronunciation, syllables, and frequency of usage. It also can tell you about relationships between words, for instance that "math" has categories like "algebra" and "geometry", or that a "finger" is part of a "hand".
• YandexTranslate - The API provides access to the Yandex online machine translation service.
• Oxford Dictionaries - The Oxford Dictionaries API gives you access to our world-renowned dictionary data in an ever-growing list of languages.
• Dictionary Translation Hablaa - FREE Dictionary Translation API Hablaa. Use it to translate words from and into more than 160 languages. The API use is free and requires no authentication. Have fun!
• Oxford English Dictionary - Shape what comes next with the Oxford Dictionaries API.
• TCYonlineDictionary - TCYonlineDictionary for antonyms and synonyms
• Tamil Dictionary - Tamil Dictionary API. Access agarathi.com tamil dictionary functionality in an easy to use REST API form.
• BOTlibre - BOT libre's goal is to foster an open, safe community of artificial intelligent chat bots and their developers.
• Handwriting Recognition - Handwriting recognition for Chinese from online dictionary Zhonga.ru. Every day thousands of our visitors use character recognition and are very happy with the accuracy of recognized results.
• WordProbe - WordProbe text translation & thesaurus api. Instantly translate words and phrases. Supports Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, & Spanish. Search more than 275,000 synonyms, antonyms, related words, and idiomatic phrases.
• SpellCheck Bot - API that performs advanced spell checking on sentences and phrases using the latest Mozilla FireFox dictionary.
• Synonyms - A tool for handling synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms and hypernyms.

Related Blog Posts

Enhanced Functionality and Improved User Experience with the Rapid API Enterprise Hub November 2023 Release

Why We Love APIs

Cloud and API: A perfect match or a complex pair?

What’s Driving the Buzz Around GPT APIs?

State of APIs: growth and more growth on tap for 2023

Rapid’s Top 10 API Predictions: what to expect from the API market in 2023