---
id: wn
version: "1.1.1"
license: MIT License Copyright (c) 2020 Michael Wayne Goodman Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"),… (full text in the JSON record)
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: active
---

# wn — Wordnet interface library

License: permissive · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 157.4K/mo

## What it is and what it does

Wn is a Python interface to wordnet databases—structured lexical resources that organize words into synonym sets (synsets) with definitions, part-of-speech tags, and semantic relationships. It provides a modern alternative to NLTK's wordnet module, with a SQL-backed database for fast queries and first-class support for multiple languages and interlingual lookups via the Collaborative Interlingual Index. The library lets you download wordnets from a curated index (similar to a package manager), query them for definitions and synonyms, explore taxonomies, compute word similarity, and perform lemmatization.

You start by downloading a wordnet (e.g., Open English WordNet 2025+) via the command line, then import the library and create a Wordnet object to query. It handles both English wordnets (with multiple historical versions for compatibility) and non-English wordnets in languages including German, Portuguese, Japanese, Spanish, and many others. The library supports the WN-LMF 1.4 format, including word pronunciations and custom lexicon extensions.

Use it for:

- Build semantic similarity or word-sense disambiguation features for NLP applications by querying synset relationships and definitions.
- Migrate from NLTK's wordnet module to a faster, more actively maintained alternative with better multilingual support.
- Perform cross-lingual semantic lookups using the Collaborative Interlingual Index to find equivalent concepts across languages.
- Extract lemmatized forms and morphological variants for text preprocessing in linguistic research or information retrieval.
- Explore word taxonomies and hypernym/hyponym relationships for knowledge graph construction or ontology building.

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Wn is a Python library for querying and exploring wordnet data—semantic networks of word meanings, definitions, and relationships—with support for multiple languages and interlingual lookups.

Yes. Wn is actively maintained, has no known vulnerabilities, installs with low friction, and offers a clean modern interface to wordnet data with strong multilingual support. It's a solid choice for NLP and linguistic tasks, especially if you need multiple languages or are migrating from NLTK. The only prerequisite is downloading wordnet data separately, which is straightforward.

## Install

pip install wn
uv add wn
poetry add wn

## Installing wn

Before you install: Low install friction: pure Python wheel with only two lightweight runtime dependencies (httpx and tomli). Active maintenance with a recent release and no known vulnerabilities.

License in practice: MIT License permits unrestricted use, modification, and redistribution for commercial and private projects with minimal obligations—only attribution and license inclusion required.

Quickstart:

pip install wn
python -m wn download oewn:2025+

import wn
en = wn.Wordnet('oewn:2025+')
synsets = en.synsets('win', pos='v')
print(synsets[0].definition())

Requires Python 3.10 or later. Wordnet data must be downloaded separately via `python -m wn download` before querying.

Verify before relying:

- Performance characteristics and query speed on large wordnet datasets compared to alternatives
- Memory footprint of the SQL-based backend for typical use cases
- Completeness and accuracy of available wordnets across supported languages

## Package facts

- License: MIT License Copyright (c) 2020 Michael Wayne Goodman Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"),… (full text in the JSON record) (permissive)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 157.4K/month (top 15,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

wordnet library python, semantic word relationships, multilingual wordnet query, word definition lookup, interlingual word index, wordnet database interface, lemmatization and word similarity, nlp, linguistics, multilingual

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