From raw dictionary data to meanings you can actually use

Open dictionaries say things like 'plural of pomegranate' and 'at: the currency of Laos'. The story of how Akshara rewrote thousands of definitions into meanings a player can learn from.

By the Akshara team · Published 2026-09-26 · All articles

Akshara ends every level by showing the real meaning of every word you built — that is the game's promise: you learn while you play. Keeping that promise turned out to be far harder than finding the words themselves, and this article is an honest account of the work between a raw dictionary and a meaning worth showing a family.

Where the raw material comes from

Our Telugu and Hindi definitions start from Wiktionary's open data, and English starts from Princeton's WordNet — both excellent scholarly resources, both freely licensed, and both never intended to be read one line at a time by a ten-year-old who just solved a puzzle. Used verbatim, they fail constantly, in three distinct ways.

Failure one: the form-of dead end

Look up a common inflected word and a raw dictionary tells you it is the "plural of", "vocative of", or "nuqtaless form of" something else. Grammatically true; humanly useless. A player who builds a word and is told it is the plural of some other word has learned nothing. We built a resolution engine that recognizes more than twenty-five kinds of these form-of glosses, follows them to the base word, and rewrites the entry into a real definition — in the player's own language, so a Telugu plural reads as "X యొక్క బహువచన రూపం — [what X actually means]" rather than an English grammar note. Around two thousand three hundred entries were rewritten this way.

Failure two: the wrong sense first

WordNet orders senses by lexicographic convention, not by what a person means. Its first sense of "at" is a unit of Laotian currency. "He" leads with the Hebrew letter; ordinary words like "head", "seed", "score" and "love" lead with technical or adult senses. A definitions screen built naively from first senses is by turns baffling and inappropriate. We re-glossed more than twelve thousand English entries to the everyday sense a player expects, and reviewed the Telugu and Hindi glosses the same way.

Failure three: what a family screen really means

Removing rude words from the word list is the easy half. The hard half is that an innocent word can carry a crude definition, and an open dictionary will happily supply it. So the meanings themselves pass a screening gate — every definition in all three languages is checked before a release can ship, and a level whose board word fails review is withdrawn entirely. The details of that pipeline are in Family-safe by design.

Why we publish this

Two reasons. First, attribution: Wiktionary and WordNet deserve their credit, which is on our About page, and our derived Telugu/Hindi meaning data remains share-alike licensed. Second, honesty about what we add: the value of Akshara's meanings is not the raw data — anyone can download that — it is the resolving, re-sensing, screening and per-level pairing that turns a scholarly database into something a child and a grandparent can read together after solving a puzzle. That transformation is ongoing; when players report a meaning that reads poorly, it gets fixed in the next release, and the fixes are listed in our release notes.