Dictionaries · head-to-head
Collins vs Wordnik
Collins' REST API serves the publisher's monolingual English and bilingual dictionary, thesaurus, translation and audio-pronunciation data used on collinsdictionary.com, with separate JSON and XML response representations for each resource. A live unauthenticated request against the real gateway returned a genuine application-level "NoAccessKey" 403 rather than a Cloudflare challenge, confirming the API Key requirement and that the service itself is fully live. Its own pricing page grants up to 5,000 calls/month free before metered tiers (from £50/month) kick in at higher volumes.
Wordnik's REST API returns word definitions aggregated from multiple published dictionaries alongside example sentences, pronunciations, related words, and corpus-derived frequency data, documented through an interactive Swagger UI. Every developer gets a free Basic plan (100 calls/hour, with an explicit nonprofit/research allowance) before paid Hobby, Pro, and Enterprise tiers raise the ceiling up to 45,000 calls/hour -- revenue that funds Wordnik's nonprofit mission to document the English language.
| Collins | Wordnik | |
|---|---|---|
| Authentication | API Key | API Key |
| Pricing | freemium | freemium |
| Formats | JSON, XML | JSON |
| CORS | no | yes |
| HTTPS | Yes | Yes |
Wordnik supports CORS, while Collins doesn't — pick Wordnik for direct browser calls.