Open English Wordnet

Open English Wordnet is a lexical network of the English language grouping words into synsets and linking them according to relationships such as hypernymy, antonymy and meronymy. It is intended to be used in natural language processing applications and provides deep lexical information about the English language as a graph.

Open English Wordnet is a fork of the Princeton WordNet developed under an open source methodology. The quality and veracity of the resource may differ from the Princeton Wordnet and we welcome contributions. Contributions to this wordnet may eventually be incorporated into future releases of Princeton WordNet. Correspondance to previous versions and wordnets in other language is provided through the Collaborative Interlingual Index (CILI). The Open English Wordnet is available as individual files in GWN-LMF format.

Since the 2025 release, Open English Wordnet is also released along with Open English Namenet, which contains a very large number of entries derived from Wikidata. As such there are three versions of the wordnet available

• Open English Wordnet: A wordnet of the common nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.
• Open English Wordnet Plus: Also contains a selection of proper nouns from Open English Namenet that have been manually validated. This is based on those in Princeton WordNet 3.1 as well as additional entries added by the Open English Wordnet team.
• Open English Namenet: The full set of proper nouns from Open English Namenet.

Releases

Open English Wordnet is released through the Open English Wordnet website. The versions released are

• 2025 Edition (Released 31st December 2025). (LMF) (JSON) (RDF) (WNDB)
• 2025 Plus (Released 31st December 2025). (LMF) (JSON) (RDF) (WNDB)
• 2024 Edition (Released 1st November 2024). (LMF) (RDF) (WNDB)
• 2023 Edition (Released 31st October 2023). (LMF) (RDF) (WNDB)
• 2022 Edition (Released 31st December 2022). (LMF) (RDF) (WNDB)
• 2021 Edition (Released 9th November 2021). (LMF) (RDF) (WNDB)
• 2020 Edition (Released 17th April 2020). (LMF) (RDF) (WNDB)
• 2019 Edition (Released 17th April 2019). (LMF) (RDF) (WNDB)

The size of each resource is as follows

The size of the core resources are as follows

Usage

Web interface

The easiest way to explore Open English Wordnet is through the web interface at https://en-word.net/. You can search for words, browse synsets, and navigate the relation graph without installing anything.

JSON API

Open English Wordnet also provides a JSON API for programmatic access, documented at https://en-word.net/api/docs.

Python (wn library)

wn is a Python library for working with wordnets programmatically. Install it with pip:

pip install wn

Then download and query Open English Wordnet:

import wn

wn.download("oewn:2025+")

oewn = wn.Wordnet("oewn:2025+")

# look up a word
for synset in oewn.synsets("bank"):
    print(synset.definition())

# find hypernyms
word = oewn.words("dog")[0]
for synset in word.synsets():
    for hypernym in synset.hypernyms():
        print(hypernym.lemmas())

Full documentation is at https://wn.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.

Building from source

To compile the YAML source files into a single LMF XML file:

python scripts/from_yaml.py

This will create a file at wn.xml that contains the complete wordnet.

Further conversions are available through the converter here.

Changes

We welcome changes, to make a change please read our contributing guidelines and make a pull request.

Open English Wordnet is a high-quality resource that acts as a gold-standard for natural language processing, as such we cannot accept any automatically generated results that have not been manually validated.

Please be aware that we use the Global WordNet Association LMF and please read the guidelines for using the format

License

Open English Wordnet is released under CC-BY 4.0

References

The canonical citation for English Wordnet is:

• John P. McCrae, Alexandre Rademaker, Francis Bond, Ewa Rudnicka and Christiane Fellbaum (2019) English WordNet 2019 – An Open-Source WordNet for English. In Proceedings of the 10th Global WordNet Conference – GWC 2019, Wrocław

More recent papers describing it include:

• John Philip McCrae, Alexandre Rademaker, Ewa Rudnicka, Francis Bond (2020) English WordNet 2020: Improving and Extending a WordNet for English using an Open-Source Methodology. In Proceedings of the LREC 2020 Workshop on Multimodal Wordnets (MMW2020), Marseille

• John P. McCrae, Michael Wayne Goodman, Francis Bond, Alexandre Rademaker, Ewa Rudnicka, Luis Morgado Da Costa (2020) The GlobalWordNet Formats: Updates for 2020. In Proceedings of the 11th Global Wordnet Conference (GWC2021), University of South Africa (UNISA)

It incorporates material from:

• Christiane Fellbaum, editor (1998) WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
• Merrick Choo Yeu Herng and Francis Bond (2021) Taboo wordnet. In Proceedings of the 11th Global Wordnet Conference (GWC2021), University of South Africa (UNISA).

Contributors

• John P. McCrae
• Alexandre Rademaker
• Ewa Rudnicka
• Bernard Bou
• Daiki Nomura
• David Cillessen
• Ciara O'Loughlin
• Cathal McGovern
• Francis Bond
• Eric Kafe
• Michael Wayne Goodman
• Merrick Choo Yeu Herng
• Enejda Nasaj