Big Huge Thesaurus API: Access 145,000 Words and Phrases

Kevin Farnham, September 4th, 2008

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The new Big Huge Thesaurus API provides a convenient interface for initiating a search based on an English word and retrieving related words and phrases.
The Big Huge Thesaurus includes more than 145,000 english language words. This site’s data is based on data from sources like the Princeton University WordNet database and the Carnegie Mellon Pronouncing Dictionary. See our Big Huge Thesaurus profile for an API overview.

As an example of using this service, calling the API using the word “president,” returns a list of terms like “President of the United States,” “Chief Executive,” “chairperson,” “head of state,” etc. The following shows how this call is made:

http://words.bighugelabs.com/api/2/president

The REST-based API and can return data in one of four formats: JSON, XML, serialized PHP array, or plain text.

There are actually two API versions. The Version 1 API returns a list of related words and phrases. The richer Version 2 API provides the part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, etc.), and categorizes the relationship between each returned word or phrase and the search word. The relationship types are synonym, antonym, related term, similar term, and user suggestions.

This API comes from the John Watson, creator of the highly popular fd’s Flickr Toys set of Flickr apps we profiled last year.