How does Wordexample.com works

Who is this website for?

 

How was it made?

We managed to obtain a list of words from the free dictionary Wiktionary.org. The data there is barely structured and it's manually entered by the users. The administrators make sure that they do it in an orderly way, but there isn't a unified format. That represented a real challenge for us because this site needed words to be highly organised in order to be able to create lists that match a certain criterion.

So, we downloaded a full dump of Wiktionary from here and parsed it into our internal database. It took two months of engineering work to get something decent. Particularly difficult was to parse the phonetic transcriptions because they were written in different formats and sometimes the system wasn't obtaining the best transcription available.

We enhanced the data from Wiktionary as much as possible trying to do advanced stuff like counting the syllables and determine how "frequent" those words were so that most common words could be presented before very rare ones.

What do we offer?

We've create a large amount of lists that we think might be interesting for the Linguistic community. Some of them were pretty straightforward and some of them took a lot of work. If you think that a list is missing, you can request it, we will read your comments and will consider if it would be useful for the community and we can add it easily.

As you might have noticed, our lists always typically show a maximum of 1,000 items even though they actually can have many more items. For each list we set a maximum that we considered reasonable for most users. If you need the full list, you can purchase it easily and it will be sent to you in your email immediately.

We also offer the possibility of downloading our whole database of words. It took a really lot of work to obtain it and we can give it away for free because anyone may copy it and resell it. Anyone interested in getting that database will find it pretty cheap, because obtaining it manually would cost much more.