Incredibly Fast Dictionary
April 14, 2009 by Paul
Filed under Educational, Student Resources
Found a fast new tool.
Definr.com is a fast, free dictionary based on Princeton’s open WordNet 2.0.
The website framework is Ruby on Rails. Looking up words in a dictionary is easy, so we do that with MySQL and cache the top 10,000 definitions in memory.
Doing word completion (a.k.a. auto-complete, auto-suggest, globbing) is not easy, at least not when you have to search through 200,000 words for every keystroke. So our word completion is done in a C module for Ruby, and the word completion server is separate from the rest of the site.