Adding lexical data to websites and apps with the Oxford Dictionaries API

Oxford Dictionaries hardly needs an introduction. As part of the renowned Oxford University Press, its mission is to offer up-to-date, accurate, and reliable lexical content in multiple languages.

The Oxford Dictionaries API program is a recent initiative by OUP that aims to give people and organizations access to the data stored in their innovative lexical engine and platform. It offers an easy way to access lexical data that can be used in applications, websites, and research projects.

Some of the benefits of this powerful API include:

• flexible endpoints including headwords, parts of speech, definitions, translations, audio, example sentences, labels, and more.
• data expertly pre-processed by in-house engineers to ensure accuracy and consistency of format across datasets — in many languages, for the first time.
• continually updated content, so anyone can have immediate access to the latest words and linguistic resources from Oxford Dictionaries’ world-renowned language research.

A few days ago we spoke with Phil Reimann, Product Manager for Oxford Dictionaries Licensing, whose role is to work with the developer and design team to ensure that the API is continually improving and adapting to new needs and technology. We asked Phil about the philosophy of the API and its objectives.

What inspired you to start the Oxford Dictionaries API program?

Oxford Dictionaries has long provided structured, up-to-date lexical data to big tech companies in many languages to support the display of dictionary entries to end users or for research and development. Over the years, we’ve learned new and exciting ways in which people want to use our data, and developing an API has enabled us to make even more content available to more people to start doing really interesting things.

In a way, the API is the easy part. What’s interesting is what we’ve done with the data.

We started by building a new lexical engine and platform — LEAP — which stores content in a linked data format and uses APIs to power our websites. This new format enables more intelligent semantic linking between our dictionary content, and Oxford Dictionaries API provides access to this functionality — and in languages that haven’t previously been available — to developers for the first time.

How are people and organizations using your API?

Part of the fun of my role is to see the novel ways in which people are using dictionary content. A lot of people use our API to add a word lookup feature to an existing app, either to help learn a language or to give more information about the content that they’re displaying. Using the API, developers can easily enable the end-user to tap or select words in their interface and display definitions, translations, synonyms, or any feature about that word, pulled straight from our dictionaries. E-readers have done this for a long time, and now we’re enabling any developer to benefit from the same functionality and high-quality data with minimal effort.

Game developers can also use the API for creating wordlists, which they can filter to exclude offensive terms and abbreviations to provide appropriate validation of words for their word-based game. We’re seeing a growing number of developers using our API to power chatbots for apps like Slack and Facebook Messenger, which have seen a real boom recently.

What’s really exciting is the interest we’re seeing in using the content in new virtual assistant platforms and augmented reality products like Amazon’s Echo and Microsoft’s Hololens. This is really the great things about APIs — we would never be able to think up stuff like this on on our own!

What do you hope to achieve with the program?

Our most important goal is to grow our developer community and to learn from them how we can develop the API further. We’re constantly looking to add new functionality and languages and, with so many options available, we want to make sure that what we’re developing suits the needs of those who are using it.

For example, we have access to huge corpora that we use internally to create our dictionaries, but someone out there might think of a new way to extract information from it that might aid natural language processing or even artificial intelligence. We want to hear from those people!

People know Oxford for world class lexicography, but now we’re combining that with cutting edge lexical technology and we’re really excited to see how people use it.

What are the challenges of growing your community?

The main challenge is that Oxford Dictionaries isn’t traditionally thought of as a tech company, and dictionaries themselves aren’t really thought of yet as powerful data resources. The challenge is therefore in communicating to developers what the potential of our data really is, and how we might enhance their application in ways they might not even realize.

How do you hope Hitch will help you tackle these challenges?

Hitch offers a great centralized place for developers to interact with multiple API providers, and we’re looking forward to engaging with the community and learn more about how we can support them through the features offered on the website. We’re also very new to this area, so it’s great to rely on the expertise and openness of an already active developer community.

Hitch will also provide us with another channel to communicate any API updates or changes to our customers or our followers, which will mean that people can adapt more quickly to make use of new features without relying on multiple channels of communication from lots of different providers.

What are some upcoming features you’re excited about?

Since we launched the API we’ve been adding features pretty much every month, and the main focus in the coming months will be to bring online more of our datasets, including both major European languages and content from our Oxford Global Languages Program. We’re also working with bringing historical English data into the API from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) which will really expand the list of potential use cases even further and open it up in this way for the first time.

Getting started with the Oxford Dictionaries API

The Oxford Dictionaries API covers multiple languages like English, Spanish, Hindi, and many more, and the development team is steadily working on adding more languages to LEAP. Oxford Dictionaries also has more languages available for licensing that are not available by API at the moment, which can be licensed upon request.

With a flexible pricing structure, the Oxford Dictionaries API also allows developers to track usage through their statistics feature, include additional users, and upgrade to different plans based on the growth of their application.

The Oxford Dictionaries documentation includes test credentials to allow developers to get started straight away, but to get full use of the API, signing up for an account is required.

Staying up-to-date with the Oxford Dictionaries API changes only takes a minute; just follow it on Hitch and we’ll notify you whenever there is a change. You can also get updates directly in your Slack channel via RSS.

If you like this article, please click on the ❤️ button below and follow this publication so you don’t miss out.

Ready to start engaging and growing your API community with Hitch? Sign up now.