1,534,416 entries with English definitions from over 350 languages

Browse: Global alphabet • All languages • Topical index • Grammatical index

a A b B c C d D e E f F g G h H i I j J k K l L m M n N o O p P q Q r R s S t T u U v V w W x X y Y z Z

Appendices • Abbreviations • Thesaurus • Rhymes • Frequency lists • Phrasebooks Welcome to the English-language Wiktionary, a collaborative project to produce a free-content multilingual dictionary. Designed as the lexical companion to Wikipedia, the encyclopaedia project, Wiktionary has grown beyond a standard dictionary and now includes a thesaurus, a rhyme guide, phrase books, language statistics and extensive appendices. We aim to include not only the definition of a word, but also enough information to really understand it. Thus etymologies, pronunciations, sample quotations, synonyms, antonyms and translations are included. Wiktionary is a wiki, which means that you can edit it, and all the content is dual-licensed under both the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License as well as the GNU Free Documentation License. Before you contribute, you may wish to read through some of our Help pages, and bear in mind that we do things quite differently from other wikis. In particular we have strict layout conventions and inclusion criteria. Learn how to start a page, how to edit entries, experiment in the sandbox and visit our Community Portal to see how you can participate in the development of Wiktionary. , Word of the day for December 22 altruistic adj

1. Regardful of others; beneficent; unselfish.

About Word of the Day • Archive • Nominate a word • RSS feed

Behind the scenes

Community Portal

A page containing everything you wanted to know about Wiktionary.

Discussion rooms

A collection of pages for the discussion of Wiktionary and the words it contains.

Things to do • Tutorial • Guidelines Index

Latin: a A b B c C d D e E f F g G h H i I j J k K l L m M n N o O p P q Q r R s S t T u U v V w W x X y Y z Z Accented: à-ç è-ý À-Ü Āā-Řř Śś-Žž Greek: Α-Κ Λ-Σ Τ-Ω α-θ ι-ρ σ-ω Ἀἀ-Ῥῥ Cyrillic: А-Н О-Я а-б в-г д-з и-к л-м н-о п р-с т-ц ч-я(-ә) Armenian: Ա-դ ե-ճ մ-ֆ Hebrew: ‏‏א-ו‎ ז-ל‎ מ-צ‎ ק-ת‎ Arabic: ‏‏ا-ب‎ ت-س‎ ش-م‎ ن-ی‎ Devanagari: अ-ठ ड-ॡ Khmer: ក – ឱ Japanese: ぁ-げ こ-ぱ ひ-ケ コ-ヶ Han Characters: 一 促 冱 卙 哪 圱 天 存 崃 弿 愷 捇 新 杁 Korean: ㄱ 가 나 다 라 마 바 사 아 자 차 카 타 파 하

Random word • New entries

On the internet, a price comparison service (also known as shopping comparison or price engine) allows individuals to see different lists of prices for specific products. Most price comparison services do not sell products themselves, but source prices from retailers from whom users can buy. In the UK, these services made between £120m and £140m in revenue in 2005 , and is growing at an annual rate of 30% to 50%.

History

The internet boom of the late 1990s made price comparison profitable.

Price comparison services were initially implemented as client-side add-ins to the Netscape and Internet explorer browsers, and required that additional software be downloaded and installed. After these initial efforts, comparison shopping migrated to the server so that the service would be accessible to anyone with a browser.

Services are now offered by websites dedicated to price comparison and by major portals such as Yahoo!.

Shopping

In the late 1990s, as more people gained access to the internet, a range of shopping portals were built that listed retailers for specific product genres. Retailers listed paid the website a fixed fee for appearing. These were little more than an online version of the Yellow Pages. As technology has improved, a newer "breed" of shopping Web portals is being created that are changing both the business model and the features and functionality offered. These sites do not "aggregate" data-feeds provided from the retailers, they search and retrieve the data directly from each retailer site. This allows for a much more comprehensive list of retailers and the ability to update the data in real-time.

Generic portals and search engines launched similar services and companies that stood to benefit from increased internet shopping (especially credit card and delivery firms) launched similar sites. Many of these services have since closed.