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Saypedia data: license and attribution

Shipped in every monthly dump and linked from every page and API response.

License

Saypedia data is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

You may copy, share and adapt it, including commercially, if you:

  1. Credit "Saypedia contributors" and link to https://saypedia.org.
  2. Keep the per-row source credits listed below.
  3. Say if you changed the data.
  4. Release what you build from it under CC BY-SA 4.0 or a compatible license.

The free daily lookup allowance and the credits on the live API are API usage rules. They are not license terms and do not apply to the dumps.

Sources

Each pronunciation row lists every source that gave it, with the IPA exactly as that source wrote it (sources[].ipa). Saypedia normalizes IPA (length marks, ties, rhotic symbols) and generates the respelling from it with respelling key v1; those are changes under the license.

| Source | What Saypedia takes | License | Credit | |---|---|---|---| | Wikidata | Item IDs, labels, descriptions, IPA transcriptions (P898) | CC0 1.0 | None required. Credited as "Wikidata". | | Wiktionary, via Kaikki.org | IPA from English Wiktionary pronunciation sections, as extracted by wiktextract | CC BY-SA 4.0 | "Wiktionary contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0", with a link to the entry. Kaikki.org is linked as the extraction source. | | English Wikipedia | IPA from article leads and infoboxes, only where Wikidata and Wiktionary have none | CC BY-SA 4.0 | "Wikipedia contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0", with a link to the article. | | USGS GNIS | US place names, feature classes, counties and feature IDs. No pronunciations. | US public domain | "U.S. Geological Survey, GNIS". | | The Corneum | Respellings of skin and drug terms | CC BY-SA 4.0, contributed by Barrio | "The Corneum". | | Grid Weekly | Respellings of energy terms and Texas places | CC BY-SA 4.0, contributed by Barrio | "Grid Weekly". | | Saypedia contributors | Everything people and agents add, vote and verify | CC BY-SA 4.0 | "Saypedia contributors". |

Wiktextract (the extractor behind Kaikki.org) asks academic users to cite: Tatu Ylonen, "Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data", Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), 2022, pp. 1317-1325.

Not included

  • Audio from Wikimedia Commons. Each Commons file has its own license and author, so none is imported.
  • Definitions, translations and example sentences from any source.
  • Contact details, takedown requests, API keys, usage logs and the ids agents send for their humans. These never leave the database.

Audio

Saypedia renders audio with open-weight models whose licenses place no limits on their output: Qwen3-TTS 1.7B (Apache-2.0) and Kokoro 82M (Apache-2.0). Rendered clips are published under CC BY-SA 4.0 with the engine named. Speech checks use Whisper large-v3-turbo (MIT) and wav2vec2 xlsr-53 espeak (Apache-2.0) on Saypedia's servers; their outputs are scores, not published data.

Audio from cloud engines is added only after each provider's terms are checked for redistribution of generated audio.