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Friday, March 29, 2013

Word Study Tool Sorting

If you use the word study tool, occasionally you'll notice that a word that can be derived from multiple entries (that is, it could be an adjective, a noun, and a participle -- or perhaps it's homonymous with another word), you might see the many words in an apparently random order. At that point, which one do you choose?

I was reading some Apuleius today and I made a simple realization when working with the word Milesio in the first paragraph. The very rare word "milesium" (a kind of kingfisher) was popping up as the first definition and that was clearly wrong. 

I thought on it for a moment and wondered how to make the much more common "Milesius" first. Then I realized something: Words which are more common in the dictionary typically have more definitions, more citations, and so on and so forth. Without any sort of intelligent algorithm, I simply sorted by longest dictionary entry to shortest dictionary entry. Voila! 

Naturally this solution won't help those Latin readers who are hoping to get some insight into rare forms, but it should help the majority of casual readers to get the see the most likely answer first. 

Feedback? Please let me know. 

Recent Site Slowness

I would like to apologize for some site slowness in the last week or two. I think the problem is fixed permanently, but if not, feel free to let me know.

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Latinitas Recens is now part of Numen

The Latinitas Recens (a dictionary of modern Latin words) is now part of Numen's core dictionary. You should be able to select it as a source in the source box (bottom right hand corner of the full site). Some interesting features of the Latinitas Recens do not currently work as well as planned, for instance expressions. Expressions (compound terms) are a new feature of Numen that will be incorporated eventually. They will show up when you search on them orbrowse for them. However, expressions will not produce paradigms nor will they be accessible through the word study tool.

Please let me know if you find any egregious errors! I'm sure there will be a few of the normal misspellings that need correction, and no doubt a few words will be in the wrong place.

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