How to use a Dictionary API

Hey!

Step 1: Get the words

1. I manually scraped tough English words from the internet and stored it in a json file.

Step 2: Finding a dictionary API

1. I used the Merriam Webster Dictionary API
2. Understanding the API seems a bit intimidating..Let's make a request with the API and check out the json response we receive: https://www.dictionaryapi.com/api/v3/references/thesaurus/json/umpire?key=yourkey

So at the topmost level we have 5 keys -

I. meta

• The key refers to metadata(a shorthand representation of data) and gives a shorthand representation of the word. It contains:
  1. "id" - the word itself (here, "umpire")
  2. "uuid" - universally unique identifier ( a string)
  3. "src" - source data set (like collegiate thesaurus)
  4. "section" - indicates section (alpha - alphabetical, geog - geographic etc..)
  5. "stems" - other words which stem from this word - lists all of the word's variants - querying the API with this word would also return the same response
  6. "syns" - synonyms

II. hwi

• means head word information
• "hw" : string headword

III. fl

• means functional label
• tells grammatical function(noun, adj etc..)

IV. def

• groups together all sense sequences and verb dividers(transitive/intransitive)
  1. sseq - sense sequence contains a series of senses

sense - a unit which contains all content relevant to a particular meaning

dt - defining text is an array which contains:

1. ["text", string] - string is definition of word
2. ["vis", [{object}]] - verbal illustration is an example sentence and each object may contain the members:

"t" : string text of verbal illustration

V. shortdef

a highly abridged version of the main definition section, consisting of just the definition text for the first three senses.

That's all for now.
Bye!
@stratospher