LATIN-ENGLISH DICTIONARY PROGRAM

WORDS - Version 1.97FC

William Whitaker

Download a free Latin-English-Latin dictionary program for your PC or MAC.

December 2006 - New release - Version 1.97FC. Additional corrections
(all by me in this case). Especially note that the text of the meanings
has been spellchecked (American spelling). I recommend downloading this
version.

October 2006 - New release of Version 1.97F. There is no change in
program. Only change is some corrections to the dictionary (thanks to
John White and Jim Stacey). The version number is not changed.

September 2006 - Updated Version 1.97F release. This includes
corrections prompted by user feedback (special thanks to Michel Come and
Shizuo Asogawa), a few additional tricks, and another 1000 entries in
the dictionary, now 39000 entries.

This Latin dictionary program, (WORDS for the PC - DOS, Windows
95/98/NT/ME/2000/XP, OS/2, LINUX - and Mac OS X - console version),
takes keyboard input or a file of Latin text lines and provides an
analysis/morphology (declension, conjugation, case, tense, etc.) of each
word individually, the dictionary form, and the translation (meaning).

am.at           V      1 1 PRES ACTIVE  IND 3 S X       
amo, amare, amavi, amatus
love, like; fall in love with; be fond of; have a tendency to;

There is an English-to-Latin phase, invoked by \~E or \~e (tilde E).

love v

amo, amare, amavi, amatus  V     1 1 [XXXAO]  
love, like; fall in love with; be fond of; have a tendency to;

diligo, diligere, dilexi, dilectus  V     3 1 [XXXAX]  
select, pick, single out; love, value, esteem; approve, aspire to, appreciate;

The dictionary contains over 39000 entries and, through additional word
construction with hundreds of prefixes and suffixes, may generate more,
leading to many hundreds of thousands of 'words' that can be formed by
declension and conjugation. Present emphisis is on classical Latin and
late Latin, but medieval Latin entries are increasing. WORDS provides a
tool to help in translations for the Latin student and a memory jog for
researchers.

This version has been considerably enhanced in neo/modern Latin, by
including, with his kind permission, the Melissa Calepinus Novus
dictionary of Guy Licoppe.

The program source (in Ada) and dictionary are freely available for
rehosting.

A Net interactive version of WORDS is at Notre Dame.

There are pointers to separate download and information pages for each
operating system.

See the particular page for each specific system.

Intel PC Systems
DOS
Windows - 1.97FC
Linux and FreeBSD.
OS/2

Mac OS X

The documentation is included with download and is also directly
accessible on this site as WORDSDOC.HTM.

Anyone not having a download capability can request a CD ROM or floppy
from the address at the end of this page.

I regret that there is no program for the Palm and other such. However,
there is a DICTPAGE.ZIP file of the dictionary
that may be downloaded and searched locally, without the parsing
provided by the program.

There are such and other supporting files to be found at WORDS OTHER
FILES. Additional displays and studies may appear
here.

The WORDS Program

WORDS runs on all systems as a console program (keyboard entry). It runs
like the DOS program, line-oriented, without fancy Windows GUI.

Run WORDS to do Latin-to-English word translations. The output looks
like this:

portas
port.as            N      1 1 ACC P F T                    
porta, portae  
gate, entrance; city gates; door; avenue;

port.as            V      1 1 PRES ACTIVE  IND 2 S X       
porto, portare, portavi, portatus  
carry, bring;


arcarum
arc.arum           N      1 1 GEN P F T                    
arca, arcae  
box, chest; strong-box, coffer; wealth, money; coffin, bier; cell, cage; ark;
ark (Noah's); Ark of the Covenant;
quadrangular landmark for surveyors;


amarum
am.arum            N      1 1 GEN P F T                    
ama, amae  
bucket; water bucket; (esp. fireman's bucket);

amar.um            ADJ    1 1 NOM S N POS                  
amar.um            ADJ    1 1 VOC S N POS                  
amar.um            ADJ    1 1 ACC S M POS                  
amar.um            ADJ    1 1 ACC S N POS                  
amarus, amara -um, amarior -or -us, amarissimus -a -um  
bitter, brackish, pungent; harsh, shrill; sad, calamitous; ill-natured, caustic

amarum             ADV    POS                              
amarum  
with bitterness, acidly, spitefully, bitterly;


amaro
amar.o             ADJ    1 1 DAT S M POS                  
amar.o             ADJ    1 1 DAT S N POS                  
amar.o             ADJ    1 1 ABL S M POS                  
amar.o             ADJ    1 1 ABL S N POS                  
amarus, amara -um, amarior -or -us, amarissimus -a -um  
bitter, brackish, pungent; harsh, shrill; sad, calamitous; ill-natured, caustic

Word mod  r => v.r 
Syncopated perfect often drops the 'v' and contracts vowel - likely
amav.ero           V      1 1 FUTP ACTIVE  IND 1 S X       
amo, amare, amavi, amatus  
love, like; fall in love with; be fond of; have a tendency to;

The codes for inflections are in the documentation, however it is
expected that the user will have had at least a few weeks of
introductory Latin in order to be able to interpret the results beyond
the simple meaning.

MEANINGS ONLY

There are academic situations in which it would be inappropriate for the
student to have access to the parsed forms information, but for which
the professor might allow simple meanings. For this situation a
modification has been made producing a program called MEANINGS for each
host. This is a version that is crippled to output ONLY MEANINGS, no
parsing of the word. It is hard-coded so there is no way to output the
case/tense, as opposed to the option in WORDS that allows the temporary
suppression of this information. It does allow the display of the
dictionary form, which seems to be appropriate and allowed for the
intended use. If anyone requires a version that supresses the dictionary
form, let me know.

DEVELOPERS AND REHOSTERS

The source program is in Ada and very system independent. While I just
have compiled executables for the PC, it should be possible to rehost
the program on any machine with an Ada compiler. Some have requested the
Ada source code for this purpose and there is now a fairly simple set of
files that should allow this. Beside PCs, it has been put on DEC, SUN
and SGI systems, at least. For developers and for porting, or anyone
interested in using parts of WORDS, copy the WORDS system source,
code, data, and tools. This is freely available without restriction.

LINKS

The Net interactive version of WORDS is at Notre Dame.

John White has produced a commercial PC program, Blitz Latin,
using the WORDS dictionary but goes further and translates sentences,
not just separate words.

Roger Pearse has written a commercial Windows program
QuickLatin. This also uses the Words
dictionary and algorithms and includes logic to help with understanding
clauses and sentences, and not just individual words.

Perry Rapp is developing
Verba, a local
dictionary program to translate single words from Latin to English, from
Spanish to English, or from English to Spanish, and also markup texts in
html. It uses the WORDS data files for the Latin option.

Mike Polis has a Tcl/Tk program called Glossator using the WORDS dictionary,
but not the program. This should work on the MAC, as well as Windows 95 and Linux.

Michael Cumming has used WORDS output in constructing his Caesar Machine.

There is a Bible site developed by
Joel Peter Anderson using WORDS to process the Vulgate. At this website
you can call up a Vulgate passage. When it comes up, each line of text
is a link to the words.exe at Notre Dame. Clicking the link brings up
your output in a new window.

Some WORDS output was used for Latin fables by Dainis Zeps.

An entirely independent downloadable program with similiar goals to
WORDS, but translating to French, can be found at
Collatinus

A downloadable MAC lexicon (no forms) by Matt Neuburg using
Peter N Lewis' ObiWan, based on 15600 entry Cassell's dictionary.

Another MAC program, including several languages, is available from
Andrew Lindesay
in New Zealand.

An almost impossible problem is covered admirably in Abbreviations in
Latin Inscriptions by
Tom Elliott.

The competition to WORDS is the Perseus net look-up based on Lewis and
Short's Latin Dictionary, Latin-to-English and English-to-Latin.