API Endpoints Overview
The Oxford Dictionaries API is a single API that provides multiple language capabilities such as dictionary definitions, lexical metadata, translations and pronunciations.
This page provides a high-level index of all available endpoints, explaining what each endpoint is for and when to use it.
Use this page to quickly determine which endpoint best fits your use case before diving into the full API reference.
Quick decision guide
Use this table if you just want the right endpoint fast.
| If you need to… | Use this endpoint |
|---|---|
| Retrieve dictionary content (headword or inflected form) | Words (recommended) |
| Handle raw or messy user input (typos, near matches, unknown words) | Search → Words |
| Resolve a valid inflected form to its headword form | Lemmas → Words |
| Retrieve dictionary content for headword-only lookup | Words (Entries optional) |
| Retrieve example sentences from a corpus | Sentences |
| Retrieve synonyms and antonyms | Thesaurus |
| Retrieve word-level translations | Translations |
| Retrieve phonetic transcriptions only for English language variants | Pronunciations (alpha) |
| Generate complete inflection tables | Inflections |
| Retrieve valid languages, filters, fields, domains, registers, grammatical features, etc. | Utility endpoints |
Main features across endpoints
The following table indicates which endpoints you can use to call each of the main lexical features typically offered by the OD API across languages*. You can explore all endpoints and obtain further technical information for each one by referring to the API Reference.
| Entries | Words | Thesaurus | Sentences | Translations | Search | Inflections | Lemmas | Utility | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Definitions | Always | Always | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Domains | Y | Y | - | - | Y | - | - | - | Y |
| Etymologies | Y | Y | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Examples | Y | Y | Always | Always | Y | - | - | - | - |
| Inflections | Y | Y | - | - | Y | Y | Always | - | - |
| Pronunciations | Always | Always | - | - | Y | - | - | - | - |
| Regional differences | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | - | - | - |
| Registers | Y | Y | Y | - | Y | - | - | - | Y |
| Synonyms | Y | Y | Always | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Antonyms | - | - | Y | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Translations | - | - | - | - | Always | Y | - | - | - |
| Alternative spellings | Y | Y | - | - | Y | - | - | - | - |
* Please note: The feature availability across endpoints shown in this table may not apply to all languages, but it typically holds true for English. For other languages, please consult the specific feature information provided below.
"Always" indicates that a feature is consistently available on an endpoint, while "Y" means the feature is generally available on the endpoint.
Core content endpoints
These endpoints return dictionary, lexical, translation or pronunciation data.
Words (recommended)
Purpose: Retrieve dictionary definitions, sense, and usage examples for a headword or inflected form
Use this endpoint when you need:
- definitions
- example sentences
- pronunciation data
- synonyms
- lexical data
Accepts:
- headwords
- valid inflected forms
Oxford Dictionary API capabilities:
Entries
Purpose: Retrieve dictionary definitions, sense, and usage examples for headwords only
Use this endpoint when you need:
- definitions
- example sentences
- pronunciation data
- synonyms
- lexical data
Accepts: headwords only
Oxford Dictionary API capabilities:
Translations
Purpose: Retrieve word-level translations between languages
Use this endpoint when you need:
- bilingual dictionary translations
- lexical data
- pronunciation data
Accepts: headwords only
Oxford Dictionary API capabilities:
Pronunciations (alpha)
Purpose: Retrieve structured pronunciation data for a word
Use this endpoint when you need:
- IPA transcriptions
- lexical-category-specific pronunciations
- English regional pronunciation variants
Accepts:
- headwords
- inflected forms
Oxford Dictionary API capabilities:
Sentences
Purpose: Retrieve example sentences extracted from real-world language corpora
Use this endpoint when you need:
- Authentic usage examples for a word
- Show how a word is used in context
- Support language-learning or vocabulary applications
Accepts: headwords only
Oxford Dictionary API capabilities:
Thesaurus
Purpose: Retrieve synonyms and antonyms for a given headword
Use this endpoint when you need:
- to display synonyms or antonyms for a word
- support writing and editing tools
- power vocabulary expansion or language-learning applications
- provide alternative word suggestions
- build semantic or related-word features
Accepts: headwords only
Oxford Dictionary API capabilities:
Note that some Words and Entries responses include sense-level links to a Thesaurus entry via the thesaurusLinks property. This allows dictionary content and thesaurus data to be connected programatically.
Discovery and normalisation endpoints
These endpoints help resolve or prepare input before retrieval
Search
Purpose: Identify candidate headwords for a given string of text using headword matching, fuzzy matching and lemmatisation. This endpoint helps resolve raw or uncertain input into valid dictionary headwords
Use this endpoint when you need:
- to handle raw user input (including misspellings or inflected forms)
- identify the correct headword before calling Entries
- provide search suggestions or autocomplete functionality
- support tolerant input matching
This endpoint is typically the first step in a workflow when the input may not already be a valid headword
Accepts: Free text input
Unlike Words (or Entries), this endpoint does not return full dictionary content - it returns matching headword candidates.
Oxford Dictionary API capabilities:
Search thesaurus
Purpose: Identify candidate headwords for a given string of text that have thesaurus data available. This endpoint helps determine whether synonym/antonym data exists on the thesaurus endpoint
Use this endpoint when you need:
- to check whether a word is available on the thesaurus endpoint
- resolve raw input before calling the thesaurus endpoint.
- provide search suggestions or autocomplete functionality for synonym-based tools
Accepts: Free text input
Oxford Dictionary API capabilities:
Search translations
Purpose: Identify candidate headwords for a given string of text that have translation data available. This endpoint helps determine whether translation data exists on the Translations endpoint
Use this endpoint when you need:
- to check whether a word is available on the Translations endpoint
- resolve raw input before calling the Translations endpoint.
- provide search suggestions or autocomplete functionality for translations-based tools
Accepts: Free text input
Oxford Dictionary API capabilities:
Lemmas
Purpose: Retrieve the canonical headword (lemma) for a given inflected form. This endpoint maps a valid inflected form to its root form (e.g. swimming → swim, stars → star)
Use this endpoint when you need to:
- Normalise inflected forms before retrieving dictionary content from the entries endpoint
- Support linguistic analysis workflows
- Resolve grammatical variants programmatically
Accepts: valid inflected word forms
Oxford Dictionary API capabilities:
In many cases, the Words endpoint can accept inflected forms directly. Lemma is most useful when you explicitly require the canonical root form before proceeding. For example, before the Entries endpoint.
Morphological generation endpoint
Inflections
Purpose: Retrieve all inflected forms for a given headword. This endpoint returns the grammatical variants of a word (e.g. tense, number, person, case), allowing applications to understand or generate different forms
Use this endpoint when you need to:
- generate all grammatical forms of a word (e.g. give → gives, giving, gave, given)
- build language-learning or conjugation tools
- support grammatical analysis or validation
- recognise all possible forms of a headword in text processing
Accepts: headwords
Oxford Dictionary API capabilities:
Inflection data may also appear within Entries, Words, and Translations responses for contextual completeness. The Inflections endpoint is specifically designed to return the complete set of forms for a given lexical entry.
Supporting endpoint
Utility
Utility endpoints help you discover supported datasets and valid request parameters so you can avoid hardcoding values:
- Languages: supported monolingual/bilingual datasets
- Filters/Fields: valid request filters + selectable response fields
- Metadata vocabularies: lexical categories, registers, domains, grammatical features (monolingual and bilingual)