About whatisa.net

What this site is

whatisa.net is a free online dictionary. Type a word, or put it straight into the address bar as whatisa.net/?word, and you get a short plain-English definition plus a few related entries.

The dictionary currently holds 84,879 English words. Every word has its own page, and you can browse the full A–Z index.

Where the definitions come from

The definitions are adapted from English Wiktionary, the free dictionary written by volunteers. For each word we keep the English definitions in a condensed form, without the examples, pronunciations and etymologies that the full Wiktionary entry contains.

Wiktionary text is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence, and so are the definitions shown here. Each definition page links to the original Wiktionary entry, where you can see the full entry, its history and its authors.

Because the text was extracted automatically, some entries are incomplete: a definition may lose a word that was a template in the source (for example “a tree of the genus .”), or show only some senses of a word. When something looks wrong, the linked Wiktionary entry is the authoritative version.

How it works

The word list is split into small files by the first two letters of each word, so a lookup only downloads a few hundred kilobytes at most. Pages are served by Cloudflare, and word pages are also rendered on the server so they work without JavaScript and can be found by search engines.

The site is free to use and does not require an account. It uses Google Analytics to count visits; see the privacy policy for details. There are no ads.