Updates and release notes

Updates and release notes

Welcome to the Oxford Dictionaries API updates page. Here you’ll find API service information plus news of developments to the API, including new datasets, new endpoints, user tutorials, and more. We’re going to be adding much more functionality and content soon – so keep an eye on this page to stay up to date.

English and Spanish language datasets – content update 2023:

The content of the English and Spanish datasets are being updated on the ODAPI. These updates take effect automatically from 29th November 2023.

English dictionary datasets

Additions:

At least 330 new headwords, phrases, and senses were added to English dictionary datasets. The following are a few examples:

  • New words include Black Vernacular English, cold open, direction of travel, folk horror, gajillion, hidden homeless, wokeism.
  • New words related to technology include alt text, cryptoeconomy, digital age, and facial recognition
  • New words in science, medicine, technology and the environment include alcohol use disorder, amoebocyte, forever chemical, gigafactory, heat island.
  • New phrases include asking for a friend, blow a hoolie, break bad, down with the kids, get the memo, no cap, and play in Peoria


IPA transcriptions and audio pronunciations were also created for new entries. We have created approximately 1,300 new pronunciation transcriptions, and approximately 2,600 new pronunciation audio files. We have also added illustrative examples to at least 840 entries.

Revisions

At least 2,400 entries were editorially revised, updated, or corrected for this release. User feedback was implemented and corrections made where appropriate.

  • Major entries revised include AI, artificial intelligence, consent, elementary particle, immersive, interactive, popcorn.
  • Full entries were created for at least 200 previously undefined derivatives, including altruist, ambassadorial, bullfighter, circularity, dandyish, exemplification, greenwashing.
  • We revised and standardized our policy on derogatory terms and added derogatory labels to at least 340 words and meanings.
  • At least 500 etymologies were updated in line with research carried out for the historical OED project, in most cases to take account of earlier first uses identified by the researchers.
Oxford Thesaurus of English and Sentence Dictionary

Reviews and updating of sensitive content and updates made on these two datasets. User feedback has been assessed and implemented as required.

Spanish dictionary datasets

Additions:

Over 600 new entries, 77 new phrases, and 5 new senses have been added to the Spanish dictionary. The update also includes over 100 new feminine inflections. The following are a few examples:

  • New entries/phrases include candidatizar (to put [sb] forward as a candidate), ciclovía (bike lane), cisgénero (cisgender), copa menstrual (menstrual cup), emergencia climática (climate emergency), lenguaje inclusivo (inclusive language), urgenciólogo (ER doctor).

Changes in Sensitivity labels:

The list of sensitivity labels has been reduced. The labels are now marginal, despectivo (derogatory), and malsonante (vulgar/offensive). Previously, some of these labels were combined into one.

Spanish Bilingual dataset:

Over 150 new or revised entries across English-Spanish and Spanish-English are included with the new update. The following are a few examples:

  • New words in English-Spanish include gender transition (transición de género), smart meter (contador inteligente), clinical depression (depresión clínica), cishet (cisheterosexual).
  • New words in Spanish-English include tecnología ponible (wearable technology), okupa (squatter), lenguaje inclusivo (inclusive language), feminicidio (femicide).

Additional maintenance updates to OD API:

As a result of further maintenance, Oxford Dictionaries API has made some minor updates in effort to continue improving the consistency in the API results. These changes only affect English and Spanish data, and they do not affect the structure or any core features. The updates will be effective on the ODAPI from 29th November 2023.

Updates include:

  • Etymologies now given at every relevant entry: In English datasets, etymologies are now given in every relevant entry, rather than just the first entry. For example, for “axe” in en-gb, the etymology is now given in both the noun entry and the verb entry. Previously, it was only given in the verb entry.
  • Change in lexicalCategory label “idiomatic”: The lexicalCategory “idiomatic” has been replaced with “phrase”, e.g. en-gb “take someone aback”.
  • Change in lexicalCategory label “residual”: The lexicalCategory “residual” with grammaticalFeature “abbreviation” has been replaced with lexicalCategory “abbreviation”, e.g. “amp” in en-gb. The lexicalCategory “residual” with grammaticalFeature “symbol” has been replaced with lexicalCategory “symbol”, e.g. “a” in en-gb.
  • Standardization of punctuation in definitions: In English and Spanish datasets, the punctuation in definitions has been standardized so that no definitions end in full stops. Previously, this was inconsistent.
  • Grouping of synonyms: In the English datasets, some synonyms that were previously treated separately, have now been grouped together. For exmaple, in “apex”, there is a synonym “highest point/part” – this was previously two synonyms “highest point” and “highest part”.
  • Removal of some crossReferences types: In English and Spanish datasets, crossReferences no longer have the types “abbreviationOf” and “anotherTermFor”. Instead, they now have the type “seeAlso”. This information about abbreviations/alternative terms is already indicated in the crossReferenceMarker, e.g. “short for ampere” in en-gb entry for “amp; “British term for soccer” in en-us entry for “football”.
  • Changes in collocation attributes: In English-Spanish and Spanish-English, the type on collocations for non-verb parts of speech “object” has been changed to “other”. For example, in the English-Spanish entry “awkward”, the collocations “movement” and “person” now have the type “other” rather than “object”.
  • Changes in some IDs: Some lexical IDs have changed. For examples, in the English thesaurus entry “arm, the ID for archaic subsense was “t_en_gb0000798.001” and is now “t_en_gb0000798.s01”. In the Spanish dictionary entry “ambigú”, the ID for synonym “bufé” was “ida61995bd-179c-4299-b0d0-ed58f4f31ba4” and is now “m_es0002951.007”. This is due to changes in our data pipeline. We recommend that you refresh your cache, to ensure that you are using the latest IDs.
  • Changes in grammaticalNote in Spanish monolingual: In the Spanish monolingual, many instances of grammaticalNote have been changed to editorialNote. For example, in the Spanish dictionary entry “ambigú”, the note “El plural es ambigúes, culto, o ambigús, popular.” now has type “editorialNote” whereas previously it was “grammaticalNote”.

If you have any queries or feedback about the recent updates, please feel free to contact us.

Maintenance Updates to OD API

Oxford Dictionaries API has recently undergone minor improvements to maintain consistency in API results. These changes do not affect the structure or any core features of the data and will be effective from 21st September 2023.

Updates include :

  • Change in labelling: The "text" element of labels such as region, register, domain and semantic class labels have previously been presented with underscores, e.g. "North_American", "Egyptian_Mythology". These have now been removed, which means that these labels do not have underscores anymore e.g. "North American", "Egyptian Mythology". This change affects all endpoints that include these labels. The "id" element has not been affected by this change and remains the same.
  • Adjustments to Search endpoint results: The responses given from the Search endpoint may contain more values than what was given previously, making the results more enriched and consistent. In some cases, the results may be presented in a slightly different order to previous results.
  • Addition to domain class values: The Domains endpoint, which returns a list of all available domain classes for a given language, has been updated. Domain class values listed now have some additional items that were previously not present. This does not affect the domain class labels given for words in the Entries and Words endpoint.

We would love to hear from you if you have any queries or feedback about the recent updates.

English and Spanish language datasets – content update

English dictionary datasets


Around 800 definitions were added to the Oxford Dictionary of English and approximately 860 entries to the New Oxford American Dictionary, including more than 400 new headwords, phrases, and senses.

In this update we covered new terms arising from the coronavirus pandemic, science, medicine, and technology. Moreover, we continued adding new English from around the world, in particular:

  • African American English: cuffing season, dookie braids, keep it 100, on the daily, usher board
  • The Caribbean: bellywash, dutty, kaiso, mannish water, nice up
  • South Asian and Indian English: kirana, lathicharge, shoe bite, short eats
  • Canadian: bunkie, bush party, gotch, lob ball.

New phrases include fall off a cliff, keep on keeping on, knock something out of the park, let the genie out of the bottle, take a knee, live one's best life, put someone on blast, read the room, spit out one’s dummy, and the clock is ticking.

Among the senses added to existing entries are:

  • jab, ‘inject (someone) with a vaccine; vaccinate’
  • pivot, ‘(especially in a business context) completely change the way in which one does something’
  • remote, ‘conducted or working away from a usual workplace or location, making use of communications technology’

More than 5,000 entries were editorially revised, updated, or corrected

  • Major entries revised include Aryan, genocide, language, quarantine, sexuality, left wing, and right wing.
  • More than 1,000 etymologies were updated
  • The Mental Health and Mental Difference project researched mental and neurodevelopmental conditions and learning disability. More than 220 entries were revised.
  • 5,000 illustrative examples, in particular those relating to political vocabulary, were reviewed and 1,000 replaced.
Oxford Thesaurus of English


More than 400 entries were revised or updated with new synonyms. Sensitive content was reviewed and updates made, and user feedback was implemented.

English Sentence Dictionary


We conducted a sensitivity check on the Sentence Dictionary, focusing on mental health, racial terms, protest, viruses, and epidemics. User feedback was implemented and corrections made.

Audio soundfiles


Audio pronunciations were created for new entries.

Spanish Monolingual


In addition to English datasets, we also worked on reviewing our Spanish monolingual dataset. We added around 100 completely new entries, 50 new senses or expressions, and 50 modified entries.

Spanish-English Bilingual


Approximately 200 new or updated entries across English-Spanish and Spanish-English. The update had a particular focus on coronavirus-related terms.

Stay tuned


Follow us on Twitter (@OxfordWordsAPI) and if you have any questions or feedback contact us!

New languages and endpoints.

Release v2.5

Datasets

Home to some of the most authoritative and reliable language data on the market, Oxford Dictionaries API now gives you access to even more languages. In this release, we’re excited to announce the inclusion of some new datasets:

  • French monolingual
  • English – Hausa (bilingual, bidirectional)
  • English – Hindi (bilingual, bidirectional)
  • English – Farsi (bilingual, monodirectional)
  • English – Georgian (bilingual, monodirectional)

You can find a full list of the available datasets on the Supported languages page.

New Features
  • We have a new endpoint, Search Thesaurus. This endpoint replicates the functionality already available in the API for our monolingual and bilingual datasets, and extends it to our thesauri. It allows users to query possible headword matches within the Thesaurus, e.g. if you search "tall", it will give you the entries that contain "tall" in the headword.
  • Bug fixes and performance improvements.

You can find details of all endpoints on the Swagger Documentation page.

Stay tuned

We’ll keep adding more datasets and features in the future, so follow us on Twitter (@OxfordWordsAPI) and if you have any questions or feedback contact us!

Sentence Dictionary 2020, and various improvements.

Release v2.4

Thank you for choosing the Oxford Dictionaries API, the self-service toolkit for our world-renowned lexical data. This version includes:

  • An update on the English Sentence Dictionary, available via the Sentences endpoint: as part of the sensitivity review hundreds of sentences were edited, deleted, or replaced. Sets of sentences were added to 250 senses that previously lacked them.
  • Multiple bug-fixes and performance improvements in the Search endpoint.
  • We moved pronunciations from lexicalEntry to entry level.
  • As announced in the v2.3.1 release notes, LexiStats is completely removed from the API.
Stay tuned

We’ll keep adding more datasets and features in the future, so follow us on Twitter (@OxfordWordsAPI) and if you have any questions or feedback contact us!

Annual update to English and Spanish lexical resources.

Release v2.3.1

At Oxford Languages we’re working hard to deliver the most updated and consistent sets of lexical data to our community of developers. v2.3.1 of the Oxford Dictionaries API brings the latest English and Spanish resources we have delivered, to reflect how people use languages in 2020.

New words, new senses, new definitions.

We have added 1,232 definitions to Oxford Dictionary of English (/en-gb/) and 1,324 to New Oxford American Dictionary (/en-us/), including 425 completely new headwords, phrases, and senses:

  • New words include bliss point, boop, climate emergency, cutie pie, dark arts, deepfake, deplatform, digital nomad, love-bomb, misogynoir, net zero, non-job, overtourism, Padawan, plant-based, stablecoin, vulture capitalism, zoomies.
  • More than thirty terms relating to the coronavirus outbreak were added, such as contact tracing, corona, Covid-19, elbow bump, flatten the curve, R0, self-isolate, shelter in place, social distancing.
  • New phrases include days of wine and roses, go rogue, grow a pair, may the Force be with you, poison the well, sunlit uplands.
  • New senses of existing words include: gammon (a middle-aged or older white man with conservative, traditionalist views, stereotypically characterized as having a red or flushed complexion); juice (a liquid containing nicotine and flavouring that is used in vaping devices); learning (a thing learned by experience; a lesson); ping-pong (a series of rapid exchanges between two parties or groups); Rover (a generic name for a pet dog); snack (a sexually attractive person).
  • New science, technology, and medical words include gas and air, geosmin, helicase, hyponatraemia, linea alba, Nipah virus, solutions architect, strange matter, virtual machine.
  • Dozens of new words from global varieties of English, including 40 terms from a special project on Philippines English and Filipino culture, for example carnap, comfort room, dirty ice cream, kare-kare, kikay, lechon, pan de sal, sara-sari store, yaya. Other World English terms include chop-chop, eat money, mama put (Nigerian), mamak, talk cock (SE Asian), add oil, dai pai dong, sandwich class (Hong Kong); wet market (China and SE Asia); char kway teow, chilli crab (Malaysia and Singapore); hensopper (South African).

We added 400 new entries across the English-Spanish and Spanish-English texts. On the English-Spanish side additions include words such as climate emergency, e-liquid, escape room, fake news, flight shame, plant-based, school strike, and unconscious bias.

On the Spanish-English side new words include: altavoz inteligente (smart speaker); cigarrillo eléctrico (e-cigarette); emergencia climática (climate emergency); leche de almendras (almond milk); masculinidad tóxica (toxic masculinity); poliamoroso (polyamorous); salud mental (mental health).

Revisions

More than 3,700 entries were editorially revised, updated, or corrected:

  • High-profile words revised include working class, middle class, upper class and related words; gypsy and related words; coronavirus; eugenics; car; surrogate mother; human trafficking; impeach.
  • Gender-neutral meanings were added to they, them, their, etc.
  • Science terms revised include entries for quark and related words; Down’s syndrome and other syndromes
Feature updates:
  • We are deprecating LexiStats. The endpoint /stats/ will be available only until the next release of the Oxford Dictionaries API (likely end of May).
  • Pronunciation audio files are now served over TLS from https://audio.oxforddictionaries.com
Stay tuned

We’ll keep adding more datasets and features in the future, so follow us on Twitter (@OxfordWordsAPI) and if you have any questions or feedback contact us!

Arabic, Russian, Marathi, and the new Inflections endpoint.

Release v2.3

The Oxford Dictionaries API is the self-service toolkit for our world-renowned dictionary data. Built to equip and empower developers with Oxford’s diverse and customizable datasets, the Oxford Dictionaries API provides reliable, up-to-date monolingual and bilingual data in an accessible, scalable environment.
Version 2.3 of the Oxford Dictionaries API introduces a number of significant additions to our language collection and feature capabilities.

Introducing the Inflections endpoint.

A much requested feature, the Inflections endpoint (often referred to as reverse lemmas), provides versatility and practicality to your projects.

From today, you’ll be able to retrieve a list of all the valid inflections starting from a dictionary headword. In a nutshell, if you give the API a headword (i.e. be in English), you’ll get am, are, is, been, being, was, were, be.

Head over to our documentation now, and check out the URL structure.

We’d love to know how you’re using the inflections endpoint, so please do get in touch.

New datasets: all about bilingual dictionaries.

Alongside the Inflections endpoint we’re continuing to add new languages to the API. In this release, we’re excited to announce the following bilingual dictionaries are now accessible via API:

  • The Oxford Russian Dictionary, the oldest of our bilingual dictionaries, is a bidirectional dictionary between English and Russian. Updated every year since 1972 with new words and senses, it can be relied upon for high quality Russian bilingual data. It contains approximately 40000 headwords from English, and 50000 from Russian. Endpoints: Translations, Search Translations.
  • The Oxford Arabic Dictionary, a bidirectional English-Arabic dictionary containing approximately 54000 words (27000 each side). Endpoints: Translations, Search Translations.
  • English-Marathi bilingual, another bidirectional dictionary, with approximately 15000 words per side. Endpoints: Translations, Search Translations.
Translations endpoint upgrade.

The Translations endpoint has a much more robust output now, with inflections, cross-references at entry level, synonyms at entry level, and derivatives at parent level.

Stay tuned

We’ll keep adding more datasets and features in the future, so follow us on Twitter (@OxfordWordsAPI) and if you have any questions or feedback contact us!

Introducing the Words endpoint

Release v2.2

You asked we listened. Introducing the Words endpoint, a new feature that enables you to retrieve definitions, pronunciations, word origins, and grammatical data across headwords and inflected words with just one call to the API.

Take, for example, swims. Previously to find the definition of swims, you’d need to first use the Lemmas endpoint to link to the headword, swim. Release v2.2 removes the middle step and streamlines the process to reach the definition of swims.

The Words endpoint is available for English, Spanish, Swahili, Latvian, Romanian, Gujarati, Hindi, and Tamil.

Dive into the documentation to find out more.

New Datasets

In this release, we’re excited to announce the inclusion of:

  • English-Italian bilingual.
  • English-Igbo.
  • English-Yoruba.
New and improved
  • Tone groups: a new data feature providing one or more encodings of a distinct tonal variation for a lexical item or its translation.
  • Thesaurus endpoint: now supports grammatical features.
  • Search endpoint: the total number of results matching a query has been fixed to provide a more accurate number, and large queries now produce more reliable results.
  • Search results are now being capped at 10,000.
  • Bug fixes and general performance improvements.
Stay tuned

We’ll keep adding more datasets and features in the future, so follow us on Twitter (@OxfordWordsAPI) and if you have any questions or feedback contact us!

Chinese bilingual, Romanian monolingual, schema changes and more

Release v2.1

Datasets

Oxford Dictionaries is home to some of the most authoritative and reliable dictionaries on the market, and we’re continuing to add those to the API. In this release, we’re excited to announce the inclusion of some new datasets:

  • Chinese bilingual.
  • Romanian monolingual.
  • Swahili, Setswana, Northern Sotho, Latvian, isiZulu, Romanian, and Tamil have now the Lemmas endpoint available.

New Features
  • Filters parameters and Fields parameter available for translations endpoint.
  • Constructions at sense level.
  • Etymologies at sense level.
  • Registers at pronunciation level.
  • Word property in schema is deprecated.
  • Other bug fixes and general performance improvements.
  • HTTP URL’s have been deprecated, from now on only HTTPS is accepted.
Stay tuned

We’ll keep adding more datasets and features in the future, so follow us on Twitter (@OxfordWordsAPI) and if you have any questions or feedback contact us!

Oxford Dictionaries API v2.0

Release v2.0

Welcome to Oxford Dictionaries API v2.0 – the biggest upgrade to the service since it launched in 2016. Whilst preserving the core functionality of v1, we have vastly improved both the API you see and how it works behind the scenes. This gives us a better platform on which to launch even more features in the future. Take a look at our new Documentation to get you started. Happy coding!


Summary of key changes:

  • New syntax for Thesaurus, Translations, and Sentences endpoints. Instead of being extensions of the Entries endpoint, each is now its own endpoint, making each one’s functionality much clearer and simpler.
  • More standard URL structure. Query parameters are now separated from the URL by ? and & to follow standard practices.
  • Result projections separated from filters. Result projections (which choose the data items that are returned in results) have been moved to an explicit fields parameter to avoid confusion with filters.
  • *New* Strict Match option. Users can now choose to return only strict match results, which would omit potential false positive entry responses.
  • *New* languages! Eight new languages have been added: Greek, isiXhosa, Quechua, Tajik, Tatar, Telugu, Tok Pisin, Turkmen.

  • COMING SOON: The Oxford English Wordlist is a new product that replaces the Wordlist endpoint. This is a comprehensive list of all valid English words across our dictionaries and is the perfect resource for building word games, giving you the confidence that only real, valid words can be played by your users. Contact us to find out more and get access before everyone else!


    NOTE: v1.11.0 will continue to work alongside v2.0 without any change to your App ID or App Key. Be sure to migrate over to v2.0 soon though, as v1 will be retired in June 2019.

    More words, more features, better security

    Release v.1.11.0

    English content update
    Almost 600 new definitions have been added, covering new senses, phrases, lemmas, and denested derivatives.

    LexiStats

  • Tokenization and lemmatization of some content in LexiStats has been fixed, improving the accuracy of the responses.
  • Corpus data has been updated, giving analysis to even more frequency data and ngrams.
  • For multi-page responses, the header now returns a header containing comma-separated URLS for the previous and next pages of results. This makes cycling through large amounts of content much more easy. As a result, instead of returning the ‘total’ as part of the metadata, we now return only the number of results in that page, as ‘num_results’.
  • Timeouts have been implemented for queries that take more than 30 seconds. Where this occurs, the error message will advise of ways to reduce the number of results.

  • New features

  • Search responses are ordered by closeness and include the match score. The results are now in a descending order by score.
  • Where available, shorter definitions are provided within the Entry sense cluster, which may be useful for display on smaller screens. You can find ‘short_definitions’ at the sense level, at the same level as ‘definitions’.
  • Sense level links between our English monolingual and English thesaurus have been added to the English entry response. Within the Entry sense cluster, ‘thesaurusLinks’ includes the thesaurus entry_id and sense_id, allowing you to extract sense-level synonyms by parsing the corresponding Thesaurus endpoint response.
  • Words passed to the Entries endpoint will be cleaned for stray punctuation, which will improve your chances of lookup success. This removes spaces and every appearance of ^ , . : ; from the begging of the string and spaces and every appearance of ^ , : ; from the end of the string, so a string such as ‘…^tidy,;::’ is cleaned as ‘tidy’ and a string like ‘.,:;;;tidy;…:’ is cleaned as ‘tidy…’. It has this behaviour as there are a number of entries which end with ‘…’, and this means that it will still be possible to find these entries in the API

  • Security fixes
    The API will now return 414 HTTP status code for any entry ID in excess of 128 characters. Instead of processing very long strings which don’t exist in our dictionary, we response with an 414 status code which means that the URL requested is longer than what the server is willing to interpret.

    For further information about the updates and for more news on the API, be sure to check out our new blog.

    Thank you for all your feedback so far. Please do continue to get in touch with any questions, feedback, or ideas for future developments to Oxford Dictionaries API.


    Lexistats – lexical data from our renowned monitor corpus

    Release v.1.10.0

    LexiStats
    A new set of endpoints has now been added to the Oxford Dictionaries API, collectively called LexiStats. Up until now the API has allowed you to query the content as it exists in our dictionaries, but before it gets there, we gather and scrutinize vast amounts of data in our New Monitor Corpus to monitor how words behave and decide what should be included. LexiStats gives you direct access to this data in the form of n-grams and frequency information. If you are creating a word game and would like to create different levels depending on ability and difficulty of the words, frequency data can help. Or, if you are working in natural language processing, n-gram frequency can help you disambiguate one word from another. We can’t wait to see what you create.

    Three LexiStats endpoints are included in this release: word, word lists, and n-grams. Read the documentation here, and feel free to contact us if you want to know more or have ideas for improvements. Please note that requests to the LexiStats API count against your normal monthly allocation of calls.

    New words
    Release v.1.10.0 also includes a big update of new words in both the Oxford Dictionary of English and the New Oxford American Dictionary.

    Both these updates are available for all new and existing developers, on all access plans, for no additional cost.

    Thank you for all your feedback so far. Please do continue to get in touch with any questions, feedback, or ideas for future developments to Oxford Dictionaries API.


    Tamil and Gujarati added to the API

    Release v.1.8.0

    Our Oxford Global Languages (OGL) programme aims to offer digital representation for 100 of the world’s languages. We’re delighted to announce that, as part of the OGL initiative, Tamil and Gujarati datasets are now available through our API.

  • Entries in Tamil can be retrieved with the language code 'ta': /api/v1/entries/en/campaign/translations=ta
  • Entries in Gujarati can be retrieved with the language code ‘gu’: /api/v1/entries/en/exquisite/translations=gu

  • Thank you for all your feedback so far. Please do continue to contact us with any questions, feedback, or ideas for future developments to Oxford Dictionaries API.


    New branding resources

    New branding resources including logos and usage guidelines are now available for those using our API.


    These can be viewed here.


    Thank you for all your feedback so far. Please do continue to contact us with any questions, feedback, or ideas for future developments to Oxford Dictionaries API.


    More calls per minute and more flexible allowances

    Two changes have been made to the API to allow for greater flexibility for those who often come close to hitting their limits:

  • We have made our paid plans more flexible so that, once they reach their limit, account holders will pay per call made over their allowance, meaning there is no longer any danger of access ceasing.
  • Previously, each of our plans entitled users to make 60 calls per minute. While this is still true of our free plan, subscribers to our paid plans can now make up to 200 requests per minute.

    Thank you for all your feedback so far. Please do continue to contact us with any questions, feedback, or ideas for future developments to Oxford Dictionaries API.

  • German and Portuguese added to the API

    Release v.1.7.0

    Oxford Dictionaries is home to some of the most authoritative bilingual dictionaries available, and we’re continuing to work hard to bring these to you via the API. In this release, we’re excited to announce the inclusion of our bilingual German and Portuguese endpoints:

  • The Oxford German Dictionary can be retrieved with the language code 'de': /api/v1/entries/en/campaign/translations=de
  • The Oxford Portuguese Dictionary can be retrieved with the language code ‘pt’: /api/v1/entries/en/exquisite/translations=pt

  • Bug fixes


    Retrieving headwords with symbols in the ID
    Previously, it was not possible to search for headwords like ‘n/a’ or ‘s/he’ because the forward slash confused the URL request. This has been resolved by adding an additional parameter after the headword:

  • To retrieve an entry
  • /api/v1/entries/en/n/a/regions=gb

    /api/v1/entries/en/s/he/regions=us

  • To retrieve a translation

    /api/v1/entries/en/s/he/translations=es


    Removal of duplicate data in the Lemmatron

    Fixes to certain incorrect inflection responses via the Lemmatron.

    Thank you for all your feedback so far. Please do continue to contact us with any questions, feedback, or ideas for future developments to Oxford Dictionaries API.

  • Explore the latest additions to Oxford Dictionaries API

    Release v.1.5.0

    The team at Oxford Dictionaries API has learnt a lot from the developer community since our first release, and this update includes a number of refinements to make the API even more relevant to your needs.

    Firstly, we’ve added the ability to filter by grammatical features to a number of our endpoints. Grammatical features include attributes like gender, number, and person. To make it easy to find out which grammatical features exist in each language dataset, we’ve added a convenient Utility endpoint: GET api/v1/grammaticalfeatures/{source_language}

    The Wordlist endpoint has also been improved to allow for more granular filtering. You can now choose between exclude, exclude_senses, and exclude_prime_senses in the exclude parameter.

    Thank you for all your feedback so far. Please do continue to contact us with any questions, feedback, or ideas for future developments to Oxford Dictionaries API.

    Explore new language datasets and the Sentence Dictionary endpoint

    Release v1.4.0

    Two exciting monolingual datasets, Swahili and Hindi, have been added to the Oxford Dictionaries API in our latest update.

    This release also sees the addition of our new Sentences endpoint for English and Spanish. The Oxford Sentence Dictionary is a vast, sense-linked databank of more than 1.9 million real-life examples of English in use, taken from the corpus. You can find out more about the Oxford corpora here.

    Introducing Search and Thesaurus endpoints

    Release v1.3.0

    v.1.3.0 is one of the most comprehensive and powerful updates yet! In response to ongoing feedback from our Early Adopters we’re delighted to have released a powerful Search endpoint in v1.3.0, allowing developers to integrate the great search capabilities that you see on our dictionary sites. This incorporates powerful headword, morphological, and ‘fuzzy’ matching to make sure that each query receives an accurate set of possible headword matches to then combine with other functionality. We’ve also launched a Thesaurus endpoint, which for the first time makes our synonym and antonym data for English accessible via API.

    That’s not all, we’ve also included new dictionary datasets from our growing range of Oxford Global Languages sites. These are:

    • Malay–English bilingual

    • Indonesian–English bilingual

    • Setswana–English bilingual

    • Urdu–English bilingual (one way)

    Thank you so much to everyone that has provided feedback. We’re looking forward to the live launch at the ends of September! You can also combine filters to create more specific lists.

    We would love to hear your feedback

    Are you part of the Early Adopter Programme? If so, would love to hear your feedback about the Oxford Dictionaries API. Would you be able to spare 5 minutes to fill out this brief survey?

    Have you logged in recently?

    By logging into your Oxford Dictionaries API account you can manage your account, update details, and look at your usage statistics.

    New datasets and endpoints added

    Release v1.2.0

    Our latest release includes the addition of two new datasets to the Oxford Dictionaries API: English-Romanian (a unidirectional bilingual dataset) and Latvian monolingual. This release also sees the launch of our exciting new Wordlists endpoint, which can be used to extract lists of words matching specified filters:

    • Lexical category: returns a list that only includes words from the specified category (e.g. nouns from a dataset).

    • Registers: returns lists of words tagged with the specified register (e.g. only words tagged as ‘rare’).

    • Domains: returns words that are tagged with a specific subject domain, such as ‘sport’.

    • Regions: lists only words from a specific region (e.g. words tagged as ‘US English’).

    Use the Utility endpoints to explore the available categories within a particular dataset and create wordlists that suit your application. You can also combine filters to create more specific lists.


    Coming soon: in September, we will be adding more datasets and a powerful Search endpoint, as well as a Thesaurus endpoint with the ability to extract synonyms and antonyms.

    Updating your API gateway url

    As part of our ongoing performance improvements we have migrated to a new API gateway. Please update your applications to the new URL asap. The old URL ceased to work after Wednesday 30th August 2016.

      Previous URL: https://od-api-2445581300291.apicast.io:443

      New URL: https://od-api.oxforddictionaries.com

    Explore our data with 5 new ‘Utility’ endpoints

    Release v1.1.0

    In order to allow quick and easy exploration of our data, we’ve launched a number of ‘Utility’ endpoints in this release. Below is a summary of all 5:

    • Domains: returns a list of the available domain tags within a dataset (e.g., nautical, photography).

    • LexicalCategories: returns the lexical categories, or parts of speech, identified in a particular dataset (e.g., particle, noun, determiner).

    • Filters: lists the different attributes you can filter different endpoints by.

    • Languages: lists the datasets available with a specified source or target language

    • Registers: returns the register labels present in a specified dataset (e.g., informal, technical, or even ‘theatrical slang’).

    Oxford Dictionaries data is incredibly rich in depth and detail, and the above Utility endpoints aim to make navigating it that bit easier. If you would like to know any more about our data, please do get in touch and we’ll help guide you through it.


    We’re listening to all the feedback we’re receiving from our Early Adopters and will be releasing even more functionality and languages in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

    Welcome to the Oxford Dictionaries API

    We’re very pleased to introduce our new API which gives you easy access to our world-renowned dictionary content. The Oxford Dictionaries API is currently only available to our Early Adopters. You can learn more about what content and functionality will be available on our About and FAQ pages. If you’d like to find out more about our Early Adopter Programme, please contact us.