Show HN: I made a faster, mobile-friendly interface for Wiktionary
kwiktionary.vercel.appWiktionary is probably the most comprehensive dictionary available, but I've often found the official website a bit overwhelming, especially on my phone. When I just want a quick definition, Wiktionary frequently starts with a long Etymology section.
This is my attempt to address that. Kwiktionary prioritizes definitions first, like a traditional dictionary. It's designed with smaller screens in mind and aims for a clean UI.
The frontend is a Next.js app (using Material UI). The definitions are served by an API I wrote using FastAPI, currently running on a e2-micro instance (let's see how long that little server holds up under load!).
A key challenge was the unstructured nature of Wiktionary. The data extraction was handled by the excellent wiktextract[0].
Source code: https://github.com/jake-anto/kwiktionary
I'm a potential user in the wiktionary frontend market cause I'm addicted to checking pronunciations but it seems the support is not great, for example searching "dog" there is no IPA.
Great catch! I've figured out the problem. My API actually returns[0] the IPA for both UK and US accents. The problem was it was under the tags "Received-Pronunciation" and "General-American" instead of the usual "En-uk" and "En-us".
I will deploy a fix soon. Thank you!
[0]: https://dict.apihost.site/v1/define/en/dog
EDIT: I've deployed a fix. This still won't cover all the edge-cases but it's much better than before.