
OneLook – Dictionary Search with Wildcards - gitgud
https://onelook.com/
======
dougb5
I'm the developer of OneLook and happy to answer any questions about it! It's
been running continuously since 1996 and I've been (very slowly) adding
features to it over the past couple of decades.

~~~
justaguyhere
where do you get the word lists from?

edit : never mind, found the list
[https://www.onelook.com/?d=all_&v=s&sort=&langdf=all](https://www.onelook.com/?d=all_&v=s&sort=&langdf=all)

~~~
dougb5
OneLook crawls and indexes the headwords from ~1000 online dictionaries and
glossaries. When you do a wildcard search, it searches all of these lists at
once. Clicking on one of the results will show you the sources. The sites
range from small subject-specific glossaries with a few dozen words, to
commercial dictionaries like Merriam-Webster and OED.

------
senkora
This, along with [https://nutrimatic.org](https://nutrimatic.org), gets used a
lot during puzzlehunts. Very neat tool.

~~~
myself248
And Nutrimatic's own instructions link to
[http://www.oneacross.com/](http://www.oneacross.com/) which is crossword-
specific. I've been using OneLook when I get really stuck on a crossword, but
of course there are more options!

------
k_sze
I could really use something like that, with the additional ability to add
custom sources.

My use cases:

I read e-books in Calibre[1]. When I read novels in The Witcher series or in
the Forgotten Realms meta-series, I need to lookup words that _may or may not_
be just a creature in the universe of the novel. Having a page that
automatically looks up a word in both real dictionaries and in The Witcher or
Forgotten Realms wiki would be really cool.

My daughter also reads e-books in Calibre, but her English is nowhere near my
level. It's a second language for her. So she needs to be able to look up
words in English-Chinese dictionaries.

[1]: [https://calibre-ebook.com/](https://calibre-ebook.com/)

------
chime
I wrote a similar app long ago and people still seem to be using it:
[http://chir.ag/projects/tip-of-my-tongue/](http://chir.ag/projects/tip-of-my-
tongue/)

------
shiftF5
OneLook also offers a nice API:
[http://www.datamuse.com/api/](http://www.datamuse.com/api/) which I've used
for a web-based Pictionary game

------
aminozuur
If there's any other word-geeks out there, check out
[http://wordo.co](http://wordo.co) and follow me there:
[https://wordo.co/@aminozuur](https://wordo.co/@aminozuur) i'll follow back so
we can both learn interesting words

------
Mindless2112
I use the OneLook reverse dictionary all the time to try to find the right
word (not for crosswords), but I do wish it were smarter. If only someone
would make a deep-learning-based reverse dictionary.

~~~
dougb5
Me too! I've carved out some time this summer to look into some approaches to
the problem based on the BERT architecture. A few years ago I tried some (pre-
BERT) deep-learning based approaches, but nothing panned out. The "dumb"
information-retrieval based approach that my service currently uses is
certainly bad, but stubbornly not as bad as all the alternatives I've tried in
the 15 years since creating it!

------
seaish
My favorite version of this has been [https://www.quinapalus.com/cgi-
bin/qat?dict=6](https://www.quinapalus.com/cgi-bin/qat?dict=6)

