Wordnik

A Ruby wrapper for the Wordnik API

This is a Ruby wrapper for the Wordnik API. Wordnik is an online dictionary with an API for getting definitions, synonyms, antonyms, and more, as described it developer.wordnik.com. This gem provides functions for the word and words endpoints of the API.

Add the wordnik gem to your Gemfile.

To use the gem, you will need to sign up for a Wordnik API key at developer.wordnik.com. Once you have your key, you can set it as an environment variable in your shell:

export WORDNIK_API_KEY=your_api_key

or in a yaml file called .wordnik.yml.

wordnik_api_key: your_api_key

require 'wordnik'
client = Wordnik::Client.new
client.definitions('ruby').each do |definition|
  puts definition[:text]
end

This gem uses net/http to make requests to the Wordnik API. If you want to use a different HTTP library, you can supply a different http_client to the Wordnik::Client constructor. For example:

require 'faraday'
client = Wordnik::Client.new(http_client: Faraday.new('https://api.wordnik.com'))

The original Wordnik gem was written in 2011; the last significant update was in 2013. As a result, the original gem does not work well with the current Wordnik API.

This gem is a rewrite of the original gem, with a focus on the word and words endpoints, and with minimizing dependencies. The official Wordnik documentation of the API is at developer.wordnik.com/docs. Some of these endpoints no longer work, and some of the data can be difficult to work with.

This gem provides a way to get the data as the API provides it, without any additional clean up, but by default it will return results in a more useable format. All results returned are returned as results from the API, interpreted as base Ruby objects. The documentation for the methods in the gem describe the parameters and return formats with a focus on the cleaned up results. Certain parameters technically allowed by the API do not have an effect on the results returned by the API (in particular, the useCanonical parameter), and so are not included in the documentation. Functions that return deprecation notices are not included in the gem (in particular, reverseDictionary and search).

In general the naming conventions of the methods in the gem use Ruby conventions, not the conventions of the API. For example, the API uses sourceDictionary and includePartOfSpeech, while the gem uses source_dictionary and include_part_of_speech. Generally, symbols are used for parameters and keys. For example, consider the following call:

client.definitions('erinaceous', limit:1)

The results look like this (showing only keys with values):

[{:attribution_text=>"from The Century Dictionary.",
  :source_dictionary=>"century",
  :text=>"Belonging to the hedgehog family; resembling a hedgehog.",
  :word=>"erinaceous",
  :attribution_url=>"https://www.wordnik.com/colophon#century/",
  :wordnik_url=>"https://www.wordnik.com/words/erinaceous"
}]

The gem includes a command line interface. To use it, install the gem and run script/console from the command line. You see some information about the use and a prompt. It can be helpful to use the console to explore the data returned by the API.