Wiktionary as a Crowdsourced Lexicon for English Dialects

Sidney Wong


Abstract
This paper evaluates Wiktionary as an ethically crowdsourced lexicon for English dialects. We took a two-phase approach, providing an in-depth descriptive analysis of the crowdsourced lexicon for 12 national varieties of English before applying the lexicon to geo-referenced, country-level social media language data to examine the real-world performance of this crowdsourced dialect lexicon. We demonstrate that Wiktionary matches or exceeds the coverage of traditional dictionaries, such as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), for regional and Outer-Circle varieties. Our dialect-specific case study on New Zealand English found high alignment between Wiktionary and the OED based on word-formation patterns (R = 0.883). Similarly, we observed high alignment between the dialect lexicon and geo-referenced social media language. While this paper found that Wiktionary has broad coverage of lexical properties, it also highlighted some of the macro-challenges involved in evaluating dialect-responsive language resources and tools, such as the role of language contact in dialects and register effects in web-based corpora.
Anthology ID:
2026.wac-1.23
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th Web-as-Corpus Workshop
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Laurie Burchell, Nikola Ljubešić, Yves Scherrer, Veronika Laippala, Vuk Dinić, Thom Vaughan
Venues:
WAC | WS
SIG:
SIGWAC
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
238–251
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wac-1.23/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sidney Wong. 2026. Wiktionary as a Crowdsourced Lexicon for English Dialects. In Proceedings of the 13th Web-as-Corpus Workshop, pages 238–251, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Wiktionary as a Crowdsourced Lexicon for English Dialects (Wong, WAC 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wac-1.23.pdf