What is "wordnet"

n. (context artificial intelligence linguistics English) A semantically structured lexical database.

1. n. any of the machine-readable lexical databases modeled after the Princeton WordNet

2. a machine-readable lexical database organized by meanings; developed at Princeton University [syn: Princeton WordNet]

WordNet is a lexical database for the English language. It groups English words into sets of synonyms called synsets, provides short definitions and usage examples, and records a number of relations among these synonym sets or their members. WordNet can thus be seen as a combination of dictionary and thesaurus. While it is accessible to human users via a web browser, its primary use is in automatic text analysis and artificial intelligence applications. The database and software tools have been released under a BSD style license and are freely available for download from the WordNet website. Both the lexicographic data (lexicographer files) and the compiler (called grind) for producing the distributed database are available.