Ninjawords -- because 18 DEX > *

Phil Crosby said that online dictionaries made him feel like shouting, in his words, "get out of my face and show me a definition!” We've all experienced this problem first-hand many times over the years, especially as dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online, and even Wiktionary bloated their pages more and more (though, in their defense, Wiktionary's "bloated" pages consist mostly of value-added content as opposed to graphics, ads, and inefficient layout coding). That's why he created Ninjawords.

In line with his original goal, Phil's solution is fast -- for me, on a mediocre broadband connection, a single lookup takes less than half a second from the time I press enter to the time I start reading the definition(s). Additionally, it is primarily populated with definitions from Wiktionary, which I'm all for. But to top it all off, Ninjawords has additional features that set it far ahead of the pack. For instance, you can enter multiple search terms by separating them with commas, and the results are all returned instantly on the same page. Also, when you have a typo, Ninjawords not only offers guesses as to what you meant to type -- it also automatically returns the definition of the most relevant suggestion.

The minimalist interface takes a queue from Google, and is welcome respite from the terrors of Merriam-Webster:


Check out the site for yourself!