The Free Dictionary

The Free Dictionary is an American online dictionary and encyclopedia that aggregates information from various sources.[1][4] It is accessible in fourteen languages.[4]

"The free dictionary" redirects here. For the Wikimedia project using the slogan "The free dictionary", see Wiktionary.
The Free Dictionary
Screenshot
Type of site
Online dictionary, encyclopedia
Available inEnglish, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian, Greek, Arabic, Polish, Turkish, Russian[1]
OwnerFarlex, Inc.[2]
URLwww.thefreedictionary.com
RegistrationOptional
LaunchedJune 5, 2003 (2003-06-05)[3]
Current statusActive

History

The Free Dictionary was launched in 2005 by Farlex.[5] In the same year, it was included in PCMag's Make Your Browser Better list.[6]

Content

The site cross-references the contents of dictionaries such as The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the Collins English Dictionary; encyclopedias such as the Columbia Encyclopedia, the Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, the Hutchinson Encyclopedia (subscription), and Wikipedia; book publishers such as McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin, HarperCollins, as well as the Acronym Finder database, several financial dictionaries, legal dictionaries, and other content.[1][4][7]

It has a feature that allows a user to preview an article while positioning the mouse cursor over a link. One can also double-click on any word to look it up in the dictionary. The website has sections such as Spelling Bee, Word Pronunciation, My Word List, and Match Up.[1]

It is available as a mobile app called "Dictionary app by Farlex".[4][8]

Wikipedia Mirror

Wikipedia content is hosted at the sub-domain encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com,[9] which is excluded from search-engine indexing in its entirety by Farlex with the use of meta tags. This is done to avoid duplicate content in the search-engine results and prevent user traffic that would otherwise go to Wikipedia.

Farlex

The site is run by Farlex, Inc., located in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania.[5][10]

Farlex also maintains a companion title, The Free Library, an online library of out-of-copyright classic books as well as a collection of periodicals of over four million articles dating back to 1984, and definition-of.com,[11] a community dictionary of slang and other terms.

The Free Library

The Free Library has a separate homepage. It is a free reference website that offers full-text versions of classic literary works by hundreds of authors. It is also a news aggregator, offering articles from a large collection of periodicals containing over four million articles dating back to 1984. Newly published articles are added to the site daily. The site comprises a selection of articles from open-access journals that can in many cases also be found on a journal's own website.

It is a sister site to The Free Dictionary and usage examples in the form of "references in classic literature" taken from the site's collection are used on The Free Dictionary's definition pages. In addition, double-clicking on a word in the site's collection of reference materials brings up the word's definition on The Free Dictionary.

See also

References
  1. Sheikh, F. D. (December 26, 2009). "WEBSITE REVIEW: THEFREEDICTIONARY.COM". Dawn.
  2. "Farlex – reference and learning tools". Farlex.
  3. "TheFreeDictionary.com WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info". WHOIS. DomainTools. Retrieved 2016-09-23.
  4. "Dictionary. App Review | Common Sense Media". Common Sense Media.
  5. "Web Dictionary Debuts". Washington Post.
  6. "Make Your Browser Better". PCMag. Archived from the original on 2005-06-25. Retrieved 2023-03-21.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  7. "Sources of data". The Free Dictionary. Retrieved June 10, 2009.
  8. "App Smart Extra – Gadgetwise Blog – The New York Times". archive.nytimes.com. 8 July 2013.
  9. "Wikipedia (TheFreeDictionary.com mirror)". TheFreeDictionary.com.
  10. "Farlex profile". Bloomberg.
  11. "Community Dictionary". www.definition-of.com.
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