Logophiles are "devastated" after Dictionary.com deleted their logs of favorited words that they carefully crafted for years. The company deleted all accounts, as well as the only ways to use Dictionary.com without seeing ads —even if you previously paid for an ad-free experience.
Dictionary.com offers a free dictionary through its website and free Android and iOS apps. It used to offer paid-for mobile apps, called Dictionary.com Pro, that let users set up accounts, use the app without ads, and enabled other features (like grammar tips and science and rhyming dictionaries) that are gone now. Dictionary.com's premium apps also let people download an offline dictionary (its free apps used to let you buy a downloadable dictionary as a one-time purchase), but offline the dictionaries aren't available anymore.
Accounts axed abruptly
About a year ago, claims of Dictionary.com’s apps being buggy surfaced online. We also found at least one person claiming that they were unable to buy an ad-free upgrade at that time.
Reports of Dictionary.com accounts being deleted and the apps not working as expected, and with much of its content removed, started appearing online about two months ago. Users reported being unable to log in and access premium features, like saved words. Soon after, Dictionary.com’s premium apps were removed from Google Play and Apple's App Store. The premium version was available for download for $6 as recently as March 23, per the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
A Reddit user who described themselves as a premium customer said they reached out to Dictionary.com’s support email and received a response saying, in part:
After careful consideration, user accounts within the Dictionary.com app have been discontinued. As a result, users are no longer able to sign in to their accounts, and any saved word lists are no longer available.
Unfortunately, since the coding technology that was used in the previous app version is different from what is used in the new app, it is not possible to recover word lists.
This change was part of our recent app update to improve the design, speed, and functionality of the Dictionary.com app. While we understand that this changes how you use Dictionary.com, we are hopeful that you will find the overall improvements provide faster search, additional content, and a better design.
Another person online supposedly received a similar message. Some people said they were unable to get in contact with Dictionary.com. Ars Technica tried contacting Dictionary.com through multiple messages to its support team, the press office of parent company IXL Learning, and The Dictionary Media Group, which IXL launched after acquiring Dictionary.com in 2024 and includes websites like Vocabulary.com, Multiplication.com, and HomeschoolMath.net. We didn't receive any response.
No refunds, no warnings
Dictionary.com doesn’t offer refunds for premium purchases and has had a policy stating that “all app purchases and in-app purchases are final sale and are not refundable" since at least August 2024.
Dictionary.com has scrubbed mention of premium features from its website. But sometime this year (likely around April 29, when Dictionary.com says it last updated its support pages), it added language around refunds that seems pertinent to its recent deletion of accounts:
If an app or in-app purchase/upgrade has been discontinued, or support for that offering has been removed, it will not be available to restore or use. Discontinued apps or in-app purchases are also not eligible for a refund.
Wordsmiths devastated
Dictionary.com says that a meaning of devastated is to be “overwhelmed or shocked, especially by profound loss, disappointment, humiliation, etc..” That’s the feeling that some of its customers are expressing over suddenly losing their saved word lists.
A Reddit user wrote in response to the update:
I am beyond enraged right now. ... I just lost my entire account and all of my collections of saved words. I'm honestly heartbroken, I save all the words I look up to study and I love looking back on them at the end of the year as an overview of the words I learned.
A one-star review for Dictionary.com’s Android app reads: "The latest update has removed several key features that made this my preferred dictionary and thesaurus app. ... I'm devastated."
And a minimally signed but passionately written petition on Change.org shares those sentiments. The author, listed as Daniel Ramirez, says:
The Dictionary.com app recently deleted all of my favorites—a collection I painstakingly built over several years—without any notice. This experience was not just inconvenient; it was a breach of trust that left me feeling frustrated and powerless.
Dictionary.com’s decision
Various factors may have caused Dictionary.com to eliminate premium features.
It’s hard to make money from mobile apps. According to RevenueCat's 2024 State of Subscription Apps report, just 14.59 percent of educational apps bring in at least $1,000 per month, and higher monthly revenues are more scarce.
Additionally, Dictionary.com, like many online companies, is dealing with a turbulent ad market that sees advertisers more selective about spending and investing more in social media. Offering users a one-time fee to eliminate ads yields revenue but not the recurring, potentially growth-driving revenue that continuously showing people ads makes. There's a similar logic among subscription streaming services pushing cheaper ad-based tiers. Those companies claim that they generate more monthly revenue from users who watch ads than from ad-free subscribers, who pay a higher monthly fee for the service.
Dictionary.com is also battling growing competition from chatbots and Google Search, which can show the definitions of words without anyone clicking through to a website or app.
After taking ownership, IXL may have found it more practical and/or economical to have one Dictionary.com app rather than free and premium versions. It may also have determined that it was more lucrative to minimize resources spent on the platform and force ads onto all users. The word list feature is also made redundant by Vocabulary.com, which IXL bought in 2020 and has a similar capability.
Deleting accounts would always have disappointed users. But Dictionary.com twisted the knife by not providing any warning. It's like when VPN provider VPNSecure suddenly canceled all lifetime subscriptions in May. The new owners of the company claimed they were unaware of the lifetime subscriptions when they acquired the VPN and determined that the subscriptions weren’t financially sustainable. Like Dictionary.com, VPNSecure killed access to something that customers previously paid for without warning and suffered backlash.
Both instances are reminders that software companies can waver and that when businesses are acquired, cuts and changes can diminish customer services.
Ramirez's petition argues that app developers should provide “clear and advance notice” if they're going to delete user account data and “an option for users to back up or retrieve their data."
Per a January 2024 snapshot of Dictionary.com's website via the Wayback Machine, its terms of service previously stated that “all rights in and to the Services are reserved by us or our licensors," users have a "limited, nonexclusive, nontransferable, non-sublicensable, revocable license to access" to Dictionary.com's services, and that the company reserved the right to "stop providing all or portions of our Services at any time."
As of this writing, though, the "terms of service" section of Dictionary.com’s terms of service page is absent. The page now only shows privacy and cookie policies.
If a third-party site or app hosts information you value and curate, the only way to ensure you can always access it is to maintain your own copies rather than relying on businesses and developers. Even if you have to save things manually, this is the only way to ensure you can access the information amid changing terms of service, ownership, and feature availability.
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