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.

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

• 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)

To compile these into a single file please use the following script

python3 scripts/merge.py

This will create a file at wn31.xml that contains the complete wordnet.

Further conversions are available through the converter here.

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

WordNet is released under CC-BY 4.0

• 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

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, pages 245–252, Wroclaw, Poland. Global Wordnet Association.

John P. McCrae, Alexandre Rademaker, Ewa Rudnicka, and 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), pages 14–19, Marseille, France. The European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

John P. McCrae, Michael Wayne Goodman, Francis Bond, Alexandre Rademaker, Ewa Rudnicka, and Luis Morgado Da Costa (2021) The GlobalWordNet Formats: Updates for 2020. In Proceedings of the 11th Global Wordnet Conference, pages 91–99, University of South Africa (UNISA). Global Wordnet Association.