See below how to specify which resource to look in, when querying the API for a specific language. 

GET /search

Search for entries with GET /search. A basic API search result consists of a JSON object containing partial lexical information on entries that match the search criteria.

To obtain more in-depth information for each entry, see GET /entries below.

The entries are returned as objects within the results array, and contain the following fields:

• the unique entry ID
• the source language code
• the headword text
• the part of speech
• the different senses with their unique sense ID and definition

Basic search parameters include:

•  source (= Global, Password, MultiGloss, Random House) –Specify which resource to look in.
  The default value is Global (the Global series).
• language (= ar, br, de, en, es, ja …) – Specify which source language to look in.
• text – Specify a headword.

For example: Go to Lexicala API at Rapid *

This query returns all the entries in the Spanish resource of the Global series with the headword “azul”.

It is possible to look for headwords with specific syntactic criteria:

• pos (= noun, verb …) – Specify part of speech.
• number (= singular, plural …) – Specify grammatical number.
• gender (= masculine, feminine …) – Specify grammatical gender.
• subcategorization (= masculine, feminine …) – Specify subcategorization.
• monosemous (boolean) – Find single sense entries only.
• polysemous (boolean) – Find multiple sense entries only.

The API also includes two functionalities pertaining to inflected forms and word stems:

• morph (boolean) – Searches for the text in both headwords and inflections, including in our supplemental morphological lists. This is based on existing human-curated data and semi-automatically generated morphological lists.
• analyzed (boolean) – A stemmer algorithm that strips words to their stem, and disregards diacritics and case (uppercase/lowercase).

The Morph Parameter

Setting morph = true looks for all the inflected forms (as well as headwords) contained both in the dictionary data and in the external morphological lists. *

Searching “houses” will return the entry “house” (noun), even though the word “houses” is not an entry in the English resource (it’s the plural form of “house”).

The Analyzed Parameter

Setting analyzed = true looks for inflected forms by applying the stemmer .*

This query returns the entries “working” (adj.), “work” (verb), “work” (noun), “hard-working” (adjective), “working class” (noun), “work on” (verb), and any other entry with the stem “work” in its headword.

The stemmer also disregards diacritics and vocalization (e.g. in Arabic and Hebrew) and removes case-sensitivity (uppercase/lowercase).

Antonym and Synonym Search

• antonyms (boolean) – Search text as an antonym.
•  synonyms (boolean) – Search text as a synonym.

It’s possible to search in the headwords either antonyms or synonyms, or both simultaneously.

GET /search-entries

Identical to /search but returns full entries rather than abridged versions.

GET /entries, GET /senses – searching by entry (or sense) ID

When searching by parameters (as explained above), each entry result contains a unique entry ID, and each sense of the entry has its own unique sense ID.

Using these IDs, it’s possible to obtain more data –syntactic and semantic information, multiword expressions, usage examples, translations, etc. – of a single entry (or sense). The entry collection groups together all entries from the different resources (Global, Password, MultiGloss, Random House).

The result JSON object contains the field id, source, language, version, related entries, headword, and senses, as follows:

• id (string) – the unique dictionary entry ID
• source (string) – the K Dictionaries resource from which the entry is taken (Global, Password, MultiGloss, Random House)
• language (string) – a two-character string that is the language code (for a list of all language codes, query GET/languages)
• version (number) – the version of the dictionary the entry is taken from
• related entries (array of strings) – an array containing the IDs of the related entries
• headword (object/ array of objects) – contains extensive syntactic and phonetic information on the headword
• senses (array of objects) – contains an elaborate disambiguation of the headword into senses, including syntactic, phonetic and semantic information

Some examples:

This query returns the complete entry “bank” * in the English core of the Global series.

This query returns the complete entry “comunemente” * in the Italian core of the MultiGloss series.
This query returns the complete entry “chair” * in the Password series.
This query returns the complete entry “smile” * in Random House Webster’s College Dictionary.
You can also search for a specific sense * by its unique sense ID. This query returns the second sense of the polysemous entry “bank”.
The JSON result for this type of query includes: id (sense id), source, language and entry (entry id).

GET /search-rdf

Similar to search-entries, but accepting less parameters and returning results in RDF (JSON-LD) form. The analyzed and morph parameters exist for this call. Only the Global series data are available for this call.

Example: This query returns all the entries that have “dog”* as their headword. The results are in RDF form.

 /rdf

Identical to /entries, but returns results in RDF (JSON-LD) form. Only the Global series data are available for this call.

 Example: This query returns the complete entry “great”* in the English resource of the Global series.

GET /search-definitions

Performs a free-text search in definitions, enabling contextually relevant results. Supported languages are: ar, br, cs, da, de, el, en, es, fr, he, hi, it, ja, ko, nl, no, pl, pt, ru, sv, th, tr.

Parameters

• text: The text to search for in definitions.
• lang (optional): Filters results to match entries in the specified language. The search text itself can be in any language.

Examples

• Searching for “green fruit” can return results like “apple” (one of its definitions is “a round green or red fruit”) and “avocado” (one of its definitions is “an oval dark green fruit with a large stone”).
•  Searching for “thing to sleep on” can return results like “pillow” (one of its definitions is “a soft object that you put your head on when you sleep”) and “bed” (one of its definitions is “a piece of furniture for sleeping”).

The results are returned as objects within the results array, and contain the following fields:

• the unique entry ID
• the source language code
• the headword text
• the part of speech
• the unique sense ID
• the sense definition