Whitaker's Words Latin Dictionary Wiki

William Whitaker developed his Latin dictionary early in the 1990s. About halfway through the decade, I developed a simple CGI script to look up Latin words and provide some grammar help. William Whitaker wrote to me and said that he had developed a program that did the job better, and as soon as I saw it in action I agreed. I suggested that he should produce a version that would allow searching via the internet, and he suggested that I should do it instead. So I learned enough Ada to develop a version to run on the web.

For the rest of his life, he told me about new versions and new developments, and I recompiled the web version and asked for his help if I had any problems. When William Whitaker died his son and heir wrote to me with the bad news. He asked me to continue to make the program (including all the source code) freely available, just as his father had always done.

The files in the project are the ones that William Whitaker had on his website. I have changed the URLs in his documentation so that they do not point to his old website, but I have not changed the code in any way. The old url still appears in the initial text displayed by the compiled versions of the program.

William Whitaker's home page for the project may be found here:

http://wwwords.sourceforge.net

His Wikipedia entry may be found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Whitaker%27s_Words

The project files include versions for Windows, Macintosh, and DOS (DK1DOS.EXE and DK2DOS.EXE) already compiled and packaged with all the necessary data files. The developer's package (wordsall.zip) includes all the source code and documentation.

Issues. William Whitaker's file for Macintosh computers will not work with the latest versions
of OS X (starting with 10.7). Erik Mendoza has developed Interpres to run on newer Macs.

Windows users sometimes balk at using a program that runs in a command window, as Whitaker's
Words does. I recommend that they right-click the top left corner of the Words command window
and choose Properties. They can then change fonts, make them bigger or smaller, and change the
foreground and background colors. In Windows I generally make everything in the command window
much bigger and use navy blue foreground on a white or grey background.

This wiki uses Markdown syntax.

Project Members:

• William Kevin Cawley (admin)