Definr is an incredibly speedy dictionary. It uses Ruby on Rails and definitions from Princeton’s WordNet 2.
0 to provide users with lightning speed (on average 14ms) suggestions for words they are possibly trying to look up. Definitions are pretty basic, but they get you the information quickly, and if you’re not sure as to how to spell the word you desire, it’s a very useful tool. They also have a Firefox extension, which most likely will be of help for people using the dictionary as a spelling resource, versus the more detailed responses that come with Dictionary.com, etc. If you are looking for a link to use for people to click on if they don’t know the meaning of a word, Definr displays the url for easy access. You can also check out the top 50 searched words, which currently appear to be very adult oriented. So if you are looking for help coming up with the exact word you are trying to search for, or if you just want the quickest possible means to looking up a word, check out Definr.
Definr.com In Their Own Words
“Definr.com is a fast, free dictionary based on Princeton’s open WordNet 2.0.
The website framework is Ruby on Rails. Looking up words in a dictionary is easy, so we do that with MySQL and cache the top 10,000 definitions in memory.
Doing word completion (a.k.a. auto-complete, auto-suggest, globbing) is not easy, at least not when you have to search through 200,000 words for every keystroke. So our word completion is done in a C module for Ruby, and the word completion server is separate from the rest of the site.
With the DefinrBot algorithm, we can do 190,000 word completions per second without caching, and that translates to about 10,000 completions per second once the Ruby layer is factored in.”
Why Definr.com It Might Be A Killer
It’s only been up and running for a few days and already has 4,613 diggs. With all of the action it’s been receiving from Digg, it still was able to maintain speed and keep running. For people looking for a way to look up the spelling of a word, the Firefox tool is definitely useful. They offer a different kind of dictionary possibility.
Some Questions About Definr.com
Will people use Definr versus other sites with more detailed dictionary entries? If people are to use the site for mainly checking their spelling, how often will they need this, since many sites include automatic spell check now? How will they be making a profit off of their site? What other features will they be adding to compete with the other dictionaries out there? 
