As part of my Hangman! application on Facebook, I plan on adding word definitions.  Like any good word app, it should tell you what the word means.  I’m not a big fan of sending off users to other sites when I don’t have to, so I looked into some dictionary APIs.

These APIs are hard to come by.  Google has a pretty good one, but it’s not open. It’s not open because their third party data providers won’t allow it to be open.  I still whipped up a little PHP love to use it, but I can’t actively use it on a public site because of their restrictions.  So I had to find something else. All the big obvious players like dictionary.com and m-w.com have APIs that aren’t free or fun.

Then I found Wordnik.  They have a sweet, sweet, young API that they were kind enough to give me access to.  As soon as I whip up my own little library to interface with it in a happy efficient way, I’ll be adding definitions and other fun word-related things to Hangman!