Generative Dictionaries on the Web

The following is a list of generative dictionary projects online, compiled mostly in 2019 – 2020.

"Generative dictionary" here means any web site, bot, or other computational thing that generates new words in an existing language, and assigns them meanings in that language.

On November 19, 2020, I gave a short talk highlighting a few of the entries here and discussing some of their different approaches. You can find a video recording and a written version of the talk here.

Revising this list in 2025, nearly all of the bots are either removed or inactive, and many of the linked pages are missing. These links are marked as such in the list below. Activity in this space seems to have faded, and I will not be making any further updates to this list.

If you would like your own work removed from this list, you can contact me by email.

– Robin Hill

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Boazim Bot

by Darius Kazemi

English - restricted
twitter (inactive)

Boazim Bot generates English boazims - a combination of two words into one in which the identities of the original words are unclear.

Dictionarish

by Martin O'Leary

English
neural network
Char-RNN
Oxford English Dictionary
site (removed) | twitter (inactive)

Dictionarish generates English words, tagged with part of speech, along with definitions, pronunciations, and sometimes etymological origin. It uses a recurrent neural network.

Fantastic Vocab

by Greg Borenstein

English
procedural
site (removed) | twitter (inactive)

Fantastic Vocab generates English words, tagged for part of speech, and definitions. Its web site collects submissions of usages of its words. It combines elements drawn from actual English words in sets of three according to a certain pattern.

Glossatory

by Mike Lynch

Glossatory generates English words and short definitions. It uses a recurrent neural network.

Lexiconjure

by Ross Goodwin

English
neural network
Python, Char-RNN, badwords.json
Oxford English Dictionary, public submissions
tumblr (inactive) | twitter (inactive) | github

Lexiconjure generates English words, tagged for part of speech and other properties, along with definitions and sometimes alternate forms or etymological origin. It uses a recurrent neural network as well as a genetic algorithm. It was trained on the Oxford English dictionary but also accepts new data from Twitter.

Read more: Cloud Raker (English) (French) (removed) | Google Arts & Culture

Lyre's Dictionary

by Robin Hill

English
procedural
Python, lemminflect
site | twitter | mastodon | bluesky | github

Lyre's Dictionary generates English words, tagged for part of speech, and short definitions. It uses a stock of actual English word elements, annotated for use with combining rules.

Power Vocab Tweet

by Allison Parrish

English
markov chain
WordNet
twitter (inactive)

Power Vocab Tweet generates English words, tagged for part of speech, with short definitions. It uses a markov chain generator drawing from definitions on WordNet.

The Definition of Game

by Paolo Pedercini

Spanish translation by Josué Monchan

English, Spanish - restricted
procedural

site (English) | site (Spanish)

The Definition of Game generates definitions for the word 'game', according to a specified grammar.

This Word Does Not Exist

by Thomas Dimson

English
neural net
Python, GPT-2
Apple dictionary, Urban Dictionary
site | twitter (inactive) | github

This Word Does Not Exist generates English words, tagged for part of speech, along with definitions and example sentences. It uses a variant of GPT-2 with a model trained on various dictionaries.

Read more: The Verge | Yahoo! Finance (removed)

Below are a few additional entries which don't completely fit the definition of "generative dictionary" given above, but are close enough to be relevant and of interest.

Deutsch Falsch

by Esther Seyffarth

English, German
Python
markov chain
Wordnik
twitter (suspended) | github

Deutsch Falsch generates German words based on the character distributions of actual German words, and gives them English glosses at random.

Vortidplenigilo

by Stephanie Hyland

English, Esperanto
procedural
Python
twitter (inactive) | github

Vortidplenigilo generates Esperanto words along with English glosses of their components. It selects a random root and applies affixes according to combining rules.

Xenolexica

by Cyborgensis (removed)

English, imaginary languages
twitter (inactive)

Xenolexica generates words in various imaginary languages, with English glosses.