Ninjawords (a really fast online dictionary) has received some much-needed upgrades. The biggest change is that Wiktionary is now the default source of words, and it is served locally (meaning very fast). Previously I was relying on the Princeton Wordnet dictionary, which is outdated and incomplete. When Wordnet didn’t have the word (which was quite often), I tried to fetch the word directly from wiktionary.org. Going to wiktionary.org is very slow. Since Wiktionary is now local, definitions are served up much more quickly.

I’m still using Wordnet as a fallback dictionary; if Wiktionary doesn’t have it, I look in Wordnet. It’s the best of both worlds.

What does Wiktionary bring to ninjawords? Tons. There are more words, and the definitons are usually much more complete than those in Princeton wordnet. In Ninjawords, you can now look up prefixes and suffixes (like -ism and -ity), interjections (like yo-ho-ho and lol), phrases (“kick the bucket” and “your mileage may vary”), acronyms (MMORPG) and even colorful Austrailian expressions like “pavement pizza.”

Additionally, some words in the definitions are now links, so you can quickly look them up if you need to, just by clicking on them. They appear on the same page, without a refresh. See here:

Random words are now cached, so if you click the random button, a random word appears instantly. It’s so fast, it’s unnatural.

I’ve fixed a few bugs here and there, mostly associated with parsing wiktionary and showing you a timeout if the definition doesn’t come up right away (e.g. if your network connection goes down).

Oh, and there’s an easter egg. The site consists of a logo, one textbox and two buttons. Shouldn’t be too hard to figure out =)

On the whole, Ninjawords is now much faster. Thanks for all the feedback thus far; please let me know if you find any bugs.