Welcome to WordSpace

APIs providing information about English words.

Background

Dictionaries, whether paper or electronic, are all organized in the same way: an alphabetical list of "word entries". Each entry containing a pronunciation guide, etymology, numbered definitions, etc. That organization supports one use case: if you know how to spell a word, the dictionary will tell you everything it knows about that word.

This hasn't changed since Samuel Johnson published his dictionary in 1755. His design has lasted 262 years. It speaks very highly indeed of Dr. Johnson. But technology has advanced beyond the printing press: it is time to revisit what is possible.

With that same information in a well designed database, you can answer questions that would otherwise be impractical. For instance. you can find out whether we get more transitive or intransitive verbs from Icelandic. You could assemble a list of words that rhyme with "potato", have three syllables and are of Greek origin. All that information is in the dictionary, it's just not accessible.

Why "WordSpace"

We wanted a name that was clearly about words, but did not imply an alphabetical list of "word entries",

Some Usage Examples

If you are writing a traditional definition lookup, you can pass us a word and we will return the information we know about that word.

If you are writing a thesaurus, you can call our API's to get a list of synonyms.

If you are writing a crossword puzzle generator, pass us the length of the word you are looking for and the letters that you already know. We will pass back a list of words that fit your criteria.

If you are doing research on the origins of words with a particular phoneme, pass the phoneme and we can tell you how many words containing that phoneme came from which origin language.

If you are writing a vocabulary training application for your children, we can provide a list of words with definitions and examples filtered by word frequency.

For poets: a rhyming dictionary.

Or, our favorite: what would Samuel Johnson have devised if VR were available 262 years ago? Whatever that is, WordSpace will support it.

Status

You can contact us at WordSpaceOne@hotmail.com.

2017/06/17

Woo Hoo! A first pass on a database is loaded. I have to do a bunch of testing, but.... Now on the the next stage: designing the User Interface. I guess for an API I should say a Machine Interface. Oh, I can now say that we get more transitive verbs than intransitive verbs from Icelandic (29 to 19 with another 12 which can swing either way).

For kicks, I thought I would check whether we have more two syllable words or three sylable words. Here is the result:

syllables	occurs
2	36214
3	32571
4	21757
1	20935
5	9657
6	2734
7	483
8	49
9	14
11	1
12	1

Incidently, it took me longer to write the HTML to display these results than it took to write the query that obtained them.

You can Help

Contact us. Let us know what API's would be useful to you.

If you know of public domain sources of information about words, please pass them along.

• word frequency
• expected vocabulary at various ages
• where used: formal, slang, vulgar, academic, educated, east coast, age of speaker, old fashioned, etc.
• pronounciation, phonetics
• examples of usage
• definition

Other people doing the same with other languages. If you know of any, let us know.

What are we missing?

You can contact us at WordSpaceOne@hotmail.com.

Why?

Recently, we found some public domain dictionary content and started thinking about the word games, writing tools, learning / teaching aids, research tools etc. that we could produce with this data.

The prospect of writing all those apps was daunting. And these were just the apps that we dreamed up in one afternoon. We decided to concentrate on designing the database to be as versatile as possible, and make it available as an API for others to use. Other developers can write those word games etc. together with the thousands of apps we haven't dreamed up.