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Wiktionary

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Wiktionary is a Wikimedia Foundation project intended to be a free wiki dictionary (including thesaurus and lexicon) in every language. It is a sister project to Wikipedia.

1 History
2 Mission
3 Multilingualism
4 Comparison to other sister projects
5 WikiSaurus
6 References
7 See also
8 External links

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History

It was set up on December 12, 2002 following a proposal by Daniel Alston. On March 29, 2004 the first non-English Wiktionaries were initiated in French and Polish. Wiktionaries in numerous other languages have since been started. Wiktionary was hosted on a temporary URL until May 1, 2004 when it switched to the current full URL. As of 2006, the English Wiktionary has more than 110,000 entries, though surpassed by the French Wiktionary, which has more than 120,000 entries.

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Mission

Wiktionary serves to:

explain the meanings of words, terms and abbreviations
act as a thesaurus by showing synonyms
translate words from one language to another.

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Multilingualism

Unlike many dictionaries, which are monolingual or bilingual, Wiktionary is a multilingual and international dictionary, meaning that the goal is to cover every word from all known languages and to do so in other languages. For example, the English Wiktionary is written in English and has articles for words from all languages. The French Wiktionary can also have articles for all those same words, but the articles are written in French.

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Comparison to other sister projects

One difference between Wiktionary and Wikipedia is that most entries begin with a lowercase letter, and pages beginning with upper- and lowercase letters can refer to different things. For example, the entries on lowercase i and uppercase I are distinct. All of the existing entries in the English Wiktionary were converted to lowercase automatically in mid-2005, and manual intervention is being used to move pages that need to be uppercase.

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WikiSaurus

WikiSaurus is a category in Wiktionary whose purpose is to serve as a thesaurus, including a thesaurus of slang words that is very useful.

See "Creating a WikiSaurus entry" for the structure of wikiSaurus entries. An example of a well-formatted entry would be the "wiktionary:WikiSaurus:insane" page.

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