Tukuk-OS📖 Tukuk-OS Dictionary
Curated shelves of real words · definitions from our own bank · the search box never closes
The interactive dictionary is the tool at /alat/dictionary — it answers any word on request. This shelf is different: six themed collections of hand-picked headwords, 168 in all, each one a permanent page rendered from tukuk.org’s own word bank — no account, no ad-gated definition, no AI paraphrase.
💭 Feelings & Moods
The words we reach for when something is happening inside — each one sharper than the last.
🌦️ Weather & Sky
Rain has eight names and the sky keeps supplying more. The vocabulary of looking up.
🧠 Mind & Thought
Words for the machinery of thinking itself — ideas about ideas, evidence about evidence.
🏞️ Land & Sea
Words the geography of coasts, rivers and plains left in English — most of them are still places you can stand on.
💼 Work & Money
The ledger vocabulary — what the payslip, the invoice and the recession are actually called.
🧺 Everyday Objects
Household words that most of us never look up because we assumed we knew them. Some of us did not.
Why only 168 words have pages?
Because a dictionary site that mirrors someone else’s API for all 200,000 words is a wall of doorway pages — technically indexed, editorially empty. These are the words chosen on purpose, grouped the way a reader browses: feelings, weather, the mind, the landscape, the office and the kitchen shelf. Every page carries the word’s sound, senses, examples and synonyms, sits in its collection with a neighbour before and after it, and says where its data comes from. New shelves appear when they are actually curated — not scraped.
For one word a day with a permanent archive, see Word of the Day; for playful encoders and dozens of languages, the dictionary & translator tool covers what this shelf does not.
Where these words come from
Definitions load first from tukuk.org’s own word bank — about 207,000 English word-sense rows built weekly on free GitHub runners from Princeton WordNet (redistributed under its free-use notice with attribution) and frequency-ranked by wordfreq (CC-BY-SA 4.0), the same local index that answers the dictionary tool instantly. Anything the bank does not hold falls back to the free Free Dictionary API, cached a day like every other lookup.