Free Dictionary API

Overview

Measurement Record

What actually happened when we called this API from our own infrastructure. Every value below was recorded by the request, not copied from the provider's documentation.

Request

GET https://api.dictionaryapi.dev/api/v2/entries/en/hello

Result

HTTP 200 · application/json · 2,007 bytes · compressed

Response time

35 ms (median of 3) · fastest 33 ms

Transport

TLSv1.3 · TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 · certificate issued by Google Trust Services

Browser CORS

Allowed — Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *

Rate limit

450 per window (448 remaining at test time)

Served by

cloudflare

Recorded

2026-08-10

Fields Returned

Top-level fields present in the response we captured, with the type and value we actually received.

Captured Response

Captured from a real request to https://api.dictionaryapi.dev/api/v2/entries/en/hello on 2026-08-10. Long arrays and nested objects are truncated to keep the shape readable.

[
  {
    "word": "hello",
    "phonetics": [
      {
        "…": "(3 more fields)"
      }
    ],
    "meanings": [
      {
        "…": "(4 more fields)"
      }
    ],
    "license": {
      "name": "CC BY-SA 3.0",
      "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0"
    },
    "sourceUrls": [
      "https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hello"
    ]
  }
]

Implementation Example

Request skeleton. The URL below is this API's documentation page, not a live endpoint — swap in the path you need from the provider's docs before running it.

const url = "https://dictionaryapi.dev/";
const response = await fetch(url);
if (!response.ok) throw new Error(`Request failed: ${response.status}`);
const data = await response.json();
console.log(data);

import requests

url = "https://dictionaryapi.dev/"
headers = {}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, timeout=30)
response.raise_for_status()
data = response.json()
print(data)

What Can You Build?

// Get word definition
const word = 'serendipity';
const response = await fetch(`https://dictionaryapi.dev`);
const data = await response.json();
const entry = Array.isArray(data) ? data[0] : data;
console.log(`${word}: ${entry.definition || entry.meanings?.[0]?.definitions?.[0]?.definition}`);

// Fetch word details for vocabulary study
const words = ['eloquent', 'ephemeral', 'ubiquitous'];
for (const word of words) {
  const response = await fetch(`https://dictionaryapi.dev`);
  const data = await response.json();
  console.log(`
📖 ${word}`);
  console.log('Definition:', data.definition || data.meanings?.[0]?.definitions?.[0]?.definition || 'N/A');
}

// Get a random word definition for word-of-the-day
const response = await fetch(`https://dictionaryapi.dev`);
const data = await response.json();
const word = data.word || data.entry || 'Word';
console.log('Word of the Day:', word);
document.getElementById('word').textContent = word;
document.getElementById('definition').textContent = 
  data.definition || data.meanings?.[0]?.definitions?.[0]?.definition || '';

Note: These code examples are AI-generated and unverified. Always refer to the official API documentation for accurate usage.

How This API Fails

We deliberately sent this API a broken request and recorded exactly what came back on 2026-08-10. Knowing the shape of an error before you hit it makes error handling much easier to write.