FreeDictionaryAPI will stop supporting Languages other than English

[phibr0]

See meetDeveloper/freeDictionaryAPI@e1a9c6c and meetDeveloper/freeDictionaryAPI#102 for further reference.

[Moonbase59]

It’s a crux with FOSS at times: All the good stuff suddenly gets bought out and buried, or made payable; or the authors can’t or don’t want to work on it anymore.

The Free Dictionary API was a step in the right direction, I felt. Sad to see it go, for anything but English.

Wonder if it makes sense to create a Wiktionary provider …

[meetDeveloper]

@Moonbase59

With heavy heart I am taking this decision. I wanted to use data from somewhere where there is no problem to use the API for commercial usage. Free Dictionary API is being used in many projects and people always come up with questions regarding commercial usage. As Wiktionary is licensed in a way that I won't have any problems on legal side. That is why I took this decision. I have not yet removed other languages, just removed it from website and GitHub so that new users don't use API for other languages.

[phibr0]

With heavy heart I am taking this decision. I wanted to use data from somewhere where there is no problem to use the API for commercial usage. Free Dictionary API is being used in many projects and people always come up with questions regarding commercial usage. As Wiktionary is licensed in a way that I won't have any problems on legal side. That is why I took this decision. I have not yet removed other languages, just removed it from website and GitHub so that new users don't use API for other languages.

Totally understand that! But why don't you provide the new Wiktionary API for more languages? I don't know about all of them but I tried the German one and it's pretty solid too!

[meetDeveloper]

What all languages you want? And can you check if all of them are very reputable on Wiktionary

[phibr0]

Hm. I don't know all of these languages myself so that might be pretty hard. I just want to get a replacement for the people who are using this Plugin. I of course also understand that this is a lot of work for you.

[phibr0]

I think most important would be, german, french, hindi, japanese, russian and spanish.

[Moonbase59]

@meetDeveloper Hey, thanks for stepping in here, much appreciated! I guess we do understand the reasons, and no small team or one-person-show can face legal issues with any of the "big ones".

Wiktionary might be good source, although maybe to much unstructured data to cleanly post-process?

In any case, maybe there can be some mutual benefit here. I feel a plugin like @phibr0’s should be able to rely on something good upstream, like the Free Dictionary API. Maybe there could be a way of helping each other, resulting in keeping the actual Wiktionary lookup "hidden" and without the need to develop a similar Wiktionary API layer for the Obsidian Dictionary plugin?

[meetDeveloper]

@Moonbase59 @phibr0

Wiktionary might be good source, although maybe to much unstructured data to cleanly post-process?

I already have fetched 300,000 English words from Wiktionary and will coming weekend set the English language source to be Wiktionary. I have to once check how much Wiktionary can be relied upon for other languages.

In any case, maybe there can be some mutual benefit here. I feel a plugin like @phibr0’s should be able to rely on something good upstream, like the Free Dictionary API. Maybe there could be a way of helping each other, resulting in keeping the actual Wiktionary lookup "hidden" and without the need to develop a similar Wiktionary API layer for the Obsidian Dictionary plugin?

Any changes in source will not affect any consumers as I will keep the response structure same so Obsidian Dictionary Plugin won't have to change in any way.

As I am only single person writing code for Dictionary API without much financial support, adding Wiktionary support for other languages might come later but I will meanwhile keep the other languages working as they are now. I have removed mention of other languages from Website and Github to avoid new users using API for languages other than English.

[phibr0]

That's nice to hear!

[ichmoimeyo]

HI

Have you checked out ...

https://yandex.com/dev/dictionary/
https://yandex.com/legal/dictionary_api/ FREE

http://www.collinslanguage.com/collins-api/ FREE -> 5000 p/m | £75p/m -> 30000 p/m

[Gentleman03]

Maybe it's possible to use Google Spell Check API?

https://serpapi.com/spell-check

[EhuddR]

Hey @phibr0! I hope you doing well. So, I was searching for an API for spanish language and suddenly this appears on my radar. Maybe you can use it for deffinitions of RAE (Real Academia Española de Lengua). I'm sorry but I have no experience with programming at all to make it work.

👉 https://github.com/squat/drae

[phibr0]

I added my own Implementation of a Google scraping mechanism, this should combat the loss of the free dictionary api a bit.