An answer, without having to email first

Type it into the search box on the front page. The form is a plain GET form, so it works with JavaScript switched off, and one search matches headwords, alternate and dialect spellings and English meanings in every language the record holds — Igbo and Yoruba today. The box carries a language selector: leave it on “All languages”, or name one to search that language alone. Leave the box empty and search anyway to browse the most common words instead.

Type the word without them. The search key is built by stripping every diacritic — ọ́ria becomes oria, àkwà becomes akwa and ṅ becomes n — so the plain spelling finds the same entries. Searching akwa returns every entry that folds to it, which is why one search can turn up bed, cry, egg and cloth.

Open the entry. Where there is a recording of that word, a play button sits beside the headword; a recording made for a dialect spelling sits beside that spelling. Press it to play. A recording belongs to the word it is of and is never borrowed for another word, so an entry with no recording shows no button rather than playing the wrong one. If a file cannot be loaded, the control says “recording unavailable” instead of looking like a recording that has not buffered yet.

Because recordings come from people. Each one is made by a contributor and credited to the speaker who made it, and the archive does not cover every headword yet. If your variety is missing, a recording you make is worth more than anything else you could send.

It may be recorded under another spelling, a different tone pattern or a dialect form — try the plain spelling, or search an English meaning instead. If it is genuinely missing, add it: the guided form is at /contribute/word. An editor reads it before it is published, and you will see the decision on your submissions page.

Reading needs nothing — no account, no sign-in, no paywall. Contributing needs an account, because a contribution is recorded against the person who made it. Create one at /join or sign in at /signin.

/contribute opens with five guided tasks, each a short form:

• a word — /contribute/word
• a name — /contribute/name
• a proverb — /contribute/proverb
• a dialect form — /contribute/dialect
• a recording — /contribute/recording

It goes to the editors, not straight into the record: an editor reads every proposal before it is published. Your submissions page keeps the state of each one — Pending while it is with the editors, Accepted when it is published, Merged when it was folded into an existing entry, Refused with the reason, and Draft for something you saved but have not sent.

Yes. A refusal carries a reason, and the refused entry can be edited and sent again from your submissions page.

The site does not promise a review time, so this page will not invent one. If something of yours has been waiting longer than you expected, write to [email protected] with the entry and it can be looked at.

Yes. Any entry page takes a recording from a signed-in account, and your name is shown as the speaker. The recorder draws a waveform while you speak, so you can see it is hearing you.

Every recording is credited to the speaker who made it, and every accepted correction is recorded against the entry it changed. Submissions are tied to your account — that is how your submissions page can show them back to you.

For one of two reasons, and both are deliberate. Either the proverb in the record is corrupt or fragmentary, in which case it is shown in the language alone rather than given a drafted English line — a guess with a warning on it is still a guess a reader will take — or an English rendering simply has not been recorded yet. The site does not machine-translate proverbs.

Every proverb page has a form for its meaning in English, and /contribute/proverb takes a new proverb altogether. A faithful rendering is exactly the contribution a proverb without one is waiting for.

The literal line renders the proverb word for word; the meaning is what it is used to say. An entry can carry either, both, or neither — and a proverb with neither is usually the case above.

A public REST API over the same dictionary, served under /api/v1. The OpenAPI document describes six operations: GET /words, GET /words/{id}, GET /languages, GET /stats, GET /word-of-the-day and POST /developers.

The document names two servers: production at https://ozituma.com/api/v1 and local development at http://localhost:3000/api/v1.

curl "https://ozituma.com/api/v1/words?q=mmiri" \
  -H "X-API-Key: ozt_live_your_key_here"

Yes, on every data endpoint. Send the key in the X-API-Key header; Authorization: Bearer <key> is accepted as an alternative. A request with no key at all is refused with 401 missing_api_key, and a key that is unknown, revoked or expired with 401 invalid_api_key. The two things that need no key are key registration itself (POST /api/v1/developers) and the OpenAPI document at /api/v1/openapi.json.

Fill in the form at /developers: your name and email are required, an organisation and what you are building are optional. It posts to POST /api/v1/developers, which is the one unauthenticated write endpoint. The key is returned once, in plain text, and stored only as a hash — it cannot be shown again, so losing it means creating another.

If you are signed in, your keys also appear at /contribute/account, where you can see today’s usage and revoke one. An account claims the developer record with the same email rather than creating a second identity, and one account may hold up to ten live keys.

Because registration is open, it is metered per IP: five key requests in a fifteen-minute window, and after that it answers 429 and asks you to try again in fifteen minutes. That throttle is the registration route’s own, not the limit on using a key.

Limits are per developer, per endpoint, per UTC day, and the number published on /developers and in /docs is the number actually enforced on your key. Every response to a metered request carries X-RateLimit-Limit, X-RateLimit-Remaining and X-RateLimit-Used, so a client can throttle itself without guessing. Over the limit you get 429 quota_exceeded, with the plan, endpoint, used and limit in the body and a Retry-After counting to 00:00 UTC. No figure is repeated on this page, because the table on /developers is read from the installation and a number copied here would go stale.

One shape: { error: { code, message, details? } }. The codes and their HTTP statuses are listed in /docs. They are not copied onto this page, so the two cannot disagree.

At /api/v1/openapi.json. It needs no key and is cached for a day. It describes those six operations, their parameters and the response schemas — and it does not list its own URL among its paths, so this is the address to remember rather than something the document will tell you.

Yes, one thing worth knowing. GET /api/v1/word-of-the-day also accepts an id parameter, so a client can pin a specific entry; the document describes only a language parameter for that operation, so this page will not present id as part of the published contract. Where the document is silent, treat the behaviour as unspecified.

The OpenAPI document. It is kept as a typed object in the repository rather than generated, so it is reviewed as a contract, and the fields a response carries are the fields described there. The prose reference at /docs carries the parameter tables a reader wants, and the same document is what code generators and API clients should be pointed at.

Every entry has a stable address:

• a word entry is /word/{language}/{slug}, with the language as its URL slug — igbo, and so on
• through the API, one entry is GET /api/v1/words/{id}, where {id} is the numeric id or the slug

The name pages print a ready-made citation at the foot of the entry. A name reads “{name}.” Ozituma. https://ozituma.com/names/{slug}.

The word entry page does not print a citation block yet. That is the honest state of it rather than a missing example here — build the citation from the entry’s address, and give the date you read it.

Use it freely, commercially included. The document states the terms as “Free to use; credit Ozituma” and points at /docs#fair-use, which is the page that spells them out: all that is asked is that whatever you publish says it came from Ozituma. Bulk downloads are allowed on the Team and Institution plans; if you need the whole dictionary rather than API access, tell us what you are building and it can be exported for you.

Name Ozituma as the source. The document’s licence line is the shortest form — “Free to use; credit Ozituma” — and the citation blocks on name entries are the fuller one. A word’s detail response also carries the attribution the source requires; where that field is present, keep it with the entry.

/donate names four things, and they are the whole of it: keeping the dictionary online — servers, storage for the pronunciations, and the bandwidth that serves the free API; getting the sources — reading, correcting and completing entries by hand, which is the slow part; listening to the recordings — checking the pronunciation archive by machine so a bad or truncated recording is found before a learner meets it; and building the rest of the archive at ozikoro.com.

Advertising, tracking, or a wall around the data. That is the donate page’s own sentence, and nothing on this site needs an account to read: the dictionary and the API stay free either way.

There are two forms — one in dollars and crypto for anyone outside Nigeria, one in naira for Nigeria. Card payments are settled on Paystack’s own secure page; crypto goes through NOWPayments, where you choose the coin and the rate is quoted at the moment you pay. This site never sees a card number and no wallet is ever connected to it. If the payment account is not configured, the page says donations are not open yet and everything else works as normal.

No refund or receipt policy is published on this site, and this page will not invent one. The two documents that do exist are /terms and /privacy. Anything about a particular gift — a receipt, a wrong amount, a refund — should go to [email protected].

/forgot takes the address you signed up with and sends a link to set a new password. Nobody can send you the old one: passwords are stored only as a salted hash. The link works once, and it stops working after 60 minutes. If email is not switched on for this installation, the page says so and records the request so an administrator can send a link by hand. If nothing arrives, look in the spam folder, then write to [email protected] from the same address.

At least ten characters. Length is the only rule; a phrase you will remember beats a jumble you will not. Setting a new password signs out every device that was signed in — including any you have forgotten about, which is usually the point.

On /contribute/account, under Your account, there is a change-password form. It asks for your current password even though you are already signed in, and it signs out every other device when it succeeds.

On /contribute/account, under API access. A key is shown once, when it is created; the database keeps only its hash and a short prefix, so nobody, including us, can show it again. Revoke a key the moment it leaks — anything using it stops working immediately — and one account may hold up to ten live keys.

Write to [email protected] from the address on the account. What happens to contributions is set out in /privacy and is not restated here.

Every entry, name and proverb has a proposal form on its own page — on a word entry it is called Propose an edit. It goes to an editor, not straight into the record: an editor reads every proposal before anything is published, and the previous wording is recorded on the way through, so nothing a source printed is lost. Sign in first; the form shows who you are submitting as.

Write to [email protected] with the page address and what is wrong. Every entry also carries a correction link at the foot of its page, which goes into the same reviewed queue.

Write to [email protected] with the address of the page and what you saw. There is no public bug tracker, and this page will not pretend there is one.

If the file cannot be loaded, the control says “recording unavailable”, which is not the same as a recording that has not started yet. Say which entry it was on when you report it and the file can be looked at.

Write to [email protected]. There is no separate abuse address or form, and this page will not invent one.