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Show HN: I made a faster, mobile-friendly interface for Wiktionary (kwiktionary.vercel.app)

5 points by sha-3 ↗ HN
Wiktionary is probably the most comprehensive dictionary available, but I've often found the official website a bit overwhelming, especially on my phone. When I just want a quick definition, Wiktionary frequently starts with a long Etymology section.

This is my attempt to address that. Kwiktionary prioritizes definitions first, like a traditional dictionary. It's designed with smaller screens in mind and aims for a clean UI.

The frontend is a Next.js app (using Material UI). The definitions are served by an API I wrote using FastAPI, currently running on a e2-micro instance (let's see how long that little server holds up under load!).

A key challenge was the unstructured nature of Wiktionary. The data extraction was handled by the excellent wiktextract[0].

Source code: https://github.com/jake-anto/kwiktionary

[0]: https://github.com/tatuylonen/wiktextract

2 comments

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MJGrzymek
I'm a potential user in the wiktionary frontend market cause I'm addicted to checking pronunciations but it seems the support is not great, for example searching "dog" there is no IPA.
sha-3
Great catch! I've figured out the problem. My API actually returns[0] the IPA for both UK and US accents. The problem was it was under the tags "Received-Pronunciation" and "General-American" instead of the usual "En-uk" and "En-us".

I will deploy a fix soon. Thank you!

[0]: https://dict.apihost.site/v1/define/en/dog

EDIT: I've deployed a fix. This still won't cover all the edge-cases but it's much better than before.