Frequently asked questions

Frequently asked questions


How can I trial the API?

In order to trial the OD API, you will need to sign-up here for the Sandbox. Upon signup you can navigate to the developer portal to view your unique App ID and App Key which will allow you to evaluate the API via the documentation or your own code or test tool (e.g. Pyton code, Postman, CURL etc.).

What’s included in the trial?

Access to the Sandbox includes a finite amount of 500 calls to all languages and endpoints for the dictionary datasets, and is limited to the first letter of the alphabet. See more info here.

What happens when my trial ends?

You will receive an email letting you know that you have reached the limit and what pricing and plans are available. See also: How can I sign up for a paid plan on the API?

Where can I find my API credentials?

To view your API Credentials, click on your account avatar in the top right corner and select “API Credentials”. Here, you will find your application key and ID. For more information on how to get started with the API, see this page.

How can I sign up for a paid plan on the API?

To signup for a paid plan, sign in and visit the Plans page. Choose from API Lite, Growing or Enterprise. If you wish to familiarise yourself with the API before subscribing to a paid plan, consider signing up for a free trial. See also: "How can I trial the API?"

How can I log in?

You can log in to your account by clicking the 'sign in' option from the main menu.

How can I find out which plan I’m on?

To check your current plan, sign in to your account and visit your account page. You can access this by clicking on your avatar in the top right corner and selecting “Account” from the account menu. Your current plan will be displayed there. Alternatively, on the plans page, your plan will be highlighted with “Your plan” on the corresponding tile.

How can I find out my usage of the OD API?

To view your OD API usage, click on your account avatar in the top right corner and select “My usage”. This will open a Statistics page showing your OD API usage details.

How can I start integrating this data into my project?

You can test out our live documentation. Or check our Making requests to the API page.

How can I delete my account?

Please contact us and we will delete your account for you.


How much does the API cost?

Please see our pricing page to understand the costs of our various plans.

I would like to use the API for Research. Is there a plan for this?

Yes, we offer a research license to individuals who require access to Oxford Languages data as part of their academic studies. In order to qualify for this, you need to be able to show proof of your affiliation with an institution or university. Please contact us and we will get back to you with all the requirements. If your application qualifies, free access will be granted for a maximum of 3 months. It is not permitted to continue using the OD API or any data drawn from the OD API past the 3 months of granted access.

Is there a plan for non-commercial use?

Please see this question about the Research plan above. We do not offer any other alternative plan for non-commercial use. To see all plans, please click here.

Can I upgrade my plan?

Yes, all of our plans can be upgraded to a higher tier at any point throughout your agreement. Please click here to see all available plans. If you are on the Enterprise plan and you would like to make changes to your call volume, please get in touch with your appointed Sales contact.

Will my credentials or account information change if I upgrade?

Paid plan credentials and account information remain the same if you upgrade from another paid plan. The changes are made on our side so that you can upgrade with ease, without any detriment to your current service. Note that once subscribed to a paid plan you will have two sets of credentials for sandbox and the paid plan respectively.

Will my API access be restricted during an upgrade?

Service is not impacted during upgrades. You will still have access to your previous service prior to the upgrade, and access to your new plan once this is complete. Upgrades are also quick and can be done straight away once requirements are confirmed.

How will my payments be taken?

Lite & Growing: Your annual payment will be made upfront using a credit or debit card. Subsequent monthly overage payments will be taken from the card on file on a set billing date each month (usually around the 5th).
Enterprise: Your annual payment will be made via an invoice with 30 days net payment terms. Subsequent monthly overage payments will be taken from the card on file on a set billing date each month (usually around the 5th).


What can I do with the Oxford Dictionaries API?

The Oxford Dictionaries API offers an easy way to access powerful lexical data (words, definitions, translations, audio pronunciations, synonyms, antonyms, parts of speech, and more) to use in your apps and websites. Please read our Terms and Conditions before signing up. Please visit our Plans page to find and select a plan that best suits your needs or please get in touch.

Which dictionary does the API data come from?

The Oxford Dictionaries API provides access to our current English dictionaries. This is our most comprehensive current English dictionary dataset and includes enhanced, updated versions of the Oxford Dictionary of English and the New Oxford American Dictionary. It includes more than 350,000 entries and is regularly updated with new words, senses, and definitions.

We also have content in Spanish, German, Portuguese, Romanian, Malay, Indonesian... and many more, and we're adding more all the time. Take a look at our supported languages page for the most up-to-date list.

Is this an Oxford English Dictionary API?

No! Oxford Dictionaries and the Oxford English Dictionary both come from the same publisher, Oxford University Press, but are different products. While Oxford Dictionaries reflects current usage of English, the OED records how language has developed over time. If you are interested in accessing the OED data through an API, you can find more information here.

I’m interested in knowing what other products are offered by Oxford Languages – where can I get more information?

Please visit the Oxford Languages website to explore our wider range of language products, including bulk datasets, training datasets, and data for additional languages not currently on the OD API. If you are interested, you may also fill in our Upgrade form and a Sales representative will get in touch with you about what we can offer.

How often does the OD API get updated?

The content of the OD API gets updated annually so that it aligns with the latest versions of our dictionaries. For more on dictionary content updates, see the Oxford Languages Annual Updates page. From time to time, there will also be development updates to the API. These rarely have any major effect on your implementation, however in cases where it does, we will send the necessary email communications to our users in due course. All updates to the OD API are also announced on the Updates page.

Do you offer audio for words?

Yes, audio file links are included in the API responses from the Entries and Words endpoints, within the “pronunciations” element. They are recordings of the word pronounced by an authentic speaker. Please note that on the OD API, we currently provide audio only for the English language (US and GB). If you are interested in audio for other languages, please contact us.

Does the data include sensitivity labels?

Yes, sensitivity labels are included in the API responses from the Entries, Words and Thesaurus endpoints, within the “register” element. This includes labels such as informal, offensive, vulgar, and many others. For a full list of register labels for a specific language, search the Register endpoint specified in the Utility section of the documentation.

Does the data include domain or semantic labels?

Yes, domain and semantic class labels are included in the API responses from the Entries and Words endpoints, within the elements “domainClasses”, “domains” or “semanticClasses”. These include labels such as medicine, business, astrology and many others. For a full list of domain labels for a specific language, search the Domains endpoint specified in the Utility section of the documentation.

Does the data include IPA transcriptions for a given word?

Yes, IPA transcriptions are included in the API responses from the Entries and Words endpoints, within the “pronunciations” element. This is a representation of the standard pronunciation of the word using the International Phonetic Alphabet as well as stress markers. British and American English pronunciations can be found by specifying the language codes en-gb and en-us in the request, respectively. If you are interested in wider coverage for pronunciation data, or are looking for pronunciation data in other languages, please contact us.

Does the API support terminology and multi-word expressions?

Our dictionary endpoints contain a wide coverage of terms and multi-word expressions, for instance “recipe book”, “in advance” and “key performance indicator”. If you cannot find a specific multi-word expression, try requesting it in the Search endpoint for closest entry matches using fuzzy search. If you believe we do not have coverage of what you are looking for, please do report it to us so that we can consider it for our future content updates.


Can I use the API in a commercial project?

Use of the Oxford Dictionaries API as a commercial product is permitted in line with our terms and conditions.

Can I use the Oxford branding in my application?

Please visit our branding resources page for the guidelines on using our branding and the appropriate logo.

Can I cache data?

Caching or any saving and use of the data offline is only permitted under an Enterprise license. Please complete our Upgrade form and select the Enterprise plan to request this functionality. Including estimates of how much data you would initially anticipate caching will expedite the consideration process.

Where can I find your terms and conditions?

Our terms and conditions can be found here.


Which languages do you support?

In the API, we currently offer content in English, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Romanian, Latvian, Malay, Indonesian... and many more, and we're adding more all the time. Take a look at our supported languages page for the most up-to-date list.
If you’re looking for a dictionary dataset for a language which isn’t currently available via the API, we might still be able to help. We have over 35 language datasets, from Afrikaans to Vietnamese, available to license via Oxford Dictionaries Licensing.

I can't see the language I need. Will you include it in the API?

Please take a look at our supported languages page. If your requested language isn't available through our API, it may still be available to licence. Please do get in contact to let us know your requirements here.


What does this error code mean?

For full information on error and status codes, please visit our HTTP Status Codes page. If you are encountering persistent issues, please contact us and someone from our technical team will be able to help.

(Sandbox users) I am getting an error when I search for some words. Why is this happening?

The Sandbox trial API is only limited to words that start with the first letter of the alphabet of any available language. Searching for words that start with letters other than the first letter of the alphabet will result in a 404 error. For full access to the ODAPI, please consider switching to one of our paid plans available on the website. For more information on status codes, please visit this page.

(Paid users) Some words are not being found on the API. What is the solution?

If you have identified words that are not being found by the API, especially on the Entries endpoint, they are likely to be inflected words. Inflected words are not accepted by all endpoints. The Entries endpoint only accepts lemmas (e.g. ‘walk’) and does not accept inflected forms (e.g. ‘walks’). The Words endpoint has the same features as the Entries endpoint, but it accepts lemmas as well as inflected forms. Use the Words endpoint if you would like full dictionary coverage of all word forms, or alternatively, if you do not have access to the Words endpoint, you may use the Entries endpoint in combination with the Lemmas endpoint. The Lemmas endpoint only accepts inflected forms (e.g. ‘walks’) and returns the corresponding lemma(s) (e.g. ‘walk’), whereas the Inflections endpoint only accepts lemmas and returns all inflected forms. If this still does not give the expected results, you may use the Search endpoint to obtain the closest matches of your input word. This works by applying fuzzy search, and it is also able to provide matches to variant spellings of the same word. If you have tried the above and believe we may not have coverage of what you are looking for, please do report it to us so that we can consider it for our future content updates.

How fast is the OD API?

Our testing has shown that 99% of requests take less than 300 milliseconds. However, this might be slightly longer for bigger word entries, therefore speed depends on the size of the response. We are continuously working on making improvements to the API to ensure its speed meets the needs of our users.

Can I add filters to my API request?

You can use fields and/or filters in your API request to restrict the API response to only the specified features you are interested in. For instance, by specifying the field ‘definitions’ in your request, the response will only return the object for definitions. Similarly, you can add a filter to return only ‘verb’ entries of a word, by specifying the lexical category. For more information on how to use our fields and filters in your requests, visit the API Reference and the Features page.

What do you get from a single API call?

Typically, one request or response gives you information about one headword. The content contained in each response depends on which endpoint and language is being called, however it is all word-based. Here’s a summary of our main features across our major endpoints:

- Entries / Words: Definitions, Examples, Phonetic transcription, Audio file, Synonyms, Etymology + other lexical metadata * 
- Translations: Translation, Examples, Phonetic transcription, Audio *
- Thesaurus (English only): Synonyms, Antonyms, Examples + other lexical metadata
- Sentences (English and Spanish only): Example sentences, Region

* Availability of these features may vary across all languages – please see here for more information.

Apart from the above endpoints, we also offer the supporting endpoints Lemmas, Inflections, Search and Utility - these are automatically included with access to any major endpoint. For more information on all endpoints and features, please refer to the OD API documentation and the features page.

What are the data formats offered by the OD API?

Currently, the OD API responses are given in JSON format. We are open to receiving requests for other formats to be made available in the future. For more information on the API’s data formats and schemas, please check out the ODAPI documentation on our website. If you are interested in XML formats, please ask us about our range of available bulk language datasets or check out more information on the Oxford Languages website.

What are the data features offered by the OD API?

To see a full list of data features and their specifications, please refer to the features page. This includes a mapping of features across endpoints and languages, typical use cases, as well as helpful tips and examples to help you get the best use out of each feature offered by the OD API.


Please contact us if you have any questions or comment about the API.