Definr.com - Incredibly Fast Dictionary

It’s only been up and running for a few days and already has 4,613 diggs. With all of the action it’s been receiving from Digg, it still was able to maintain speed and keep running. For people looking for a way to look up the spelling of a word, the Firefox tool is definitely useful. They offer a different kind of dictionary possibility.

Will people use Definr versus other sites with more detailed dictionary entries? If people are to use the site for mainly checking their spelling, how often will they need this, since many sites include automatic spell check now? How will they be making a profit off of their site? What other features will they be adding to compete with the other dictionaries out there?

"Definr.com is a fast, free dictionary based on Princeton's open WordNet 2.0.
The website framework is Ruby on Rails. Looking up words in a dictionary is easy, so we do that with MySQL and cache the top 10,000 definitions in memory.
Doing word completion (a.k.a. auto-complete, auto-suggest, globbing) is not easy, at least not when you have to search through 200,000 words for every keystroke. So our word completion is done in a C module for Ruby, and the word completion server is separate from the rest of the site.
With the DefinrBot algorithm, we can do 190,000 word completions per second without caching, and that translates to about 10,000 completions per second once the Ruby layer is factored in."