Why Batch Processing?

Language professionals, researchers, and developers often need to analyze, translate, or annotate large datasets of words. Until now, querying our API one word at a time meant slower workflows and higher rate-limit constraints. Today, we're thrilled to introduce Batch Processing—a new feature that lets you process up to 10,000 words per request while maintaining our signature accuracy and speed.

Whether you're building an NLP pipeline, preparing educational materials, or localizing content at scale, batch processing eliminates the friction of iterative API calls.

How It Works

Batch processing simplifies your workflow into three straightforward steps:

  1. Submit your list — Send a JSON array or CSV payload containing the words, phrases, or IDs you want to process.
  2. Process asynchronously — Our distributed infrastructure handles the heavy lifting. You receive a job ID immediately.
  3. Retrieve results — Poll the job endpoint or use webhooks. Results are delivered in the same order as your input, enriched with definitions, phonetics, translations, and metadata.
ℹ️ Rate Limits & Quotas

Pro plans support up to 5 concurrent batch jobs with a 10,000 word limit per batch. Enterprise customers can configure custom limits and priority processing queues.

API Integration

Integrating batch processing into your existing stack takes minutes. Here's a quick example using cURL:

bash 
curl -X POST https://api.dictionary.com/v2/batch \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "words": ["ephemeral", "serendipity", "eloquent", "resilient"],
    "options": {
      "include_pronunciation": true,
      "languages": ["en", "es", "fr"],
      "format": "json"
    }
  }'

The response includes a job_id and estimated completion time. You can track progress and download the final payload via:

bash 
curl https://api.dictionary.com/v2/batch/{job_id}/results \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

Real-World Use Cases

📚 Educational Content Creation

Generate vocabulary lists, flashcards, and pronunciation guides for entire chapters or textbooks in one request.

🌍 Localization & i18n

Batch-translate UI strings, product catalogs, or legal documents while preserving context and regional variations.

🤖 NLP & Data Enrichment

Enrich raw text datasets with lemmas, POS tags, semantic relationships, and multilingual mappings.

📊 Market Research

Analyze competitor terminology, customer feedback keywords, or survey responses at scale.

Best Practices

  • Deduplicate inputs — Remove exact duplicates before submission to optimize processing time and reduce costs.
  • Use webhooks — Instead of polling, register a webhook URL to receive instant notifications when batches complete.
  • Handle partial failures gracefully — While our success rate is 99.8%, some obscure or malformed terms may return fallback data. Always validate output schemas.
  • Cache results — Static definitions rarely change. Store successful responses in your database to avoid redundant calls.
💡 Pro Tip

Combine batch processing with our Custom Dictionaries feature to inject domain-specific terminology (medical, legal, technical) directly into your pipeline.

Getting Started

Batch processing is available now for all Pro and Enterprise subscribers. If you're on the Free plan, you can test up to 100 words per batch to evaluate the feature.

Ready to scale your language workflows? Read the full documentation or upgrade your plan to unlock unlimited batch capacity.