Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion

As an international dictionary, Wiktionary is intended to include "all words in all languages".

As a general guideline, a term should be included if:

• It is clearly in widespread use.
• It is used in a well known work.
• It appears in a refereed academic journal.
• It has been used in running text in at least three independently recorded instances, whether in print, audio, video or on the internet.

In the above, in running text is meant to exclude references to a word, such as "The word baeiouc has no known meaning, but does contain all five vowels in order. The criterion of independence is meant to exclude made-up or exteremely specialized words that appear only in works by a given author or otherwise within a closed context.

There is a separate designation, protologism, for terms defined in the hopes that they will be used, but which are not actually in wide use. These are listed on Wiktionary:List of protologisms, but should not be given their own entries.

Uncommon languages are acceptable as long as they are (or were) used for everyday communication by some identifiable, natural population of humans. If the language lacks an ISO 639 language code, it's almost surely not acceptable.

Since this is the English Wiktionary, all definitions should be given in English. If a non-English word has the same spelling as an English one, place all of the definitions on the same page but arrange them under their respective language headings with the English entries first. For example:

==English==
===Noun===
'''boot'''
# A shoe that covers part of the leg.
===Verb===
'''to boot'''
# To kick.

==German==
===Noun===
'''boot'''
# Boat.

For more information about formatting entries, see Wiktionary:Entry layout explained.

So long as it meets the criteria above, a term need not be a single word. Any of these is also acceptable:

• Multiple-word terms such as post office.
• Idioms such as Give up the ghost.
• Abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms such as NBA.
• Prefixes and suffixes such as -ist.
• Characters used in ideographic or phonetic writing such as 字 or æ.

A proper noun may be included if any of the following apply:

1. It is used as a common noun (especially if it is commonly written without capitalization).
2. It is used in an attributive sense with the expectation that the meaning will be widely understood (a David Beckham hairstyle).
3. Words or terms derived from the name are already in Wiktionary.

Care should be taken so that entries do not become encyclopedic in nature; if this happens, such content should be moved to Wikipedia, but the entry itself should be kept.