Paradigms for adjectives and pronouns are now online! Find any adjective or pronoun in the dictionary and click See the Complete Paradigm! Please report any errors you find and I’ll fix them as soon as possible!
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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.
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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.
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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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Within the next week, Numen’s physical server will be moving to a new location — hopefully with a connection about 6 times faster than it’s been over the last 10 months. Of course, it’s not been exactly slow! But I just wanted to get the word out there because the site might be down for a day or two. With any luck, I can minimize that time and also make it happen on a slow day (historically, Saturdays are the slowest days). I apologize for the inconvenience.
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Hi, Numen users. I really apologize, even more profusely than last time. It turns out that the “power failure” was a little bit more severe than I first believed. It turns out that the motherboard in the server failed. Not to worry – I’ve replaced all the dead machinery with working parts and it appears that most of the features of the site are up and running. I’ll be restoring other services as I find out about them — but if you happen to see something not working, please let me know right away! Thanks!
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My apologies! There was a power failure and I didn’t know the server was down. đ But it’s back up now!
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I was testing word-cloud-making software this morning.
This one seems to get the gist of whatâs going on pretty well. Here is the
first book of the Aeneid. I left in the common words, but I can look at this
word cloud and fairly easily get a sense of whatâs going on. If I were writing
an article about this book based on the word cloud, I think Iâd be able to know
fairly quickly what the main themes are. Aeneas, Dido, Venus, goddess, weapons,
ships, Troy, Juno, queen, etc. This is the only word cloud software that
understands Latin, by the way J
Tagxedo
This one is neat because you can make shapes. However, I donât feel itâs really
great with themes. It doesnât put the most important words front and center. I
think the way Wordle was doing it was giving Capitalized words a heavier weighting.
However, itâs got a *lot* of
options for customizations. There is also a âproâ version which allows you to
do more advanced editing and customization.
TagCrowd
This one is fairly plain and without many options. It really doesnât give me a
good sense of the book at all. Itâs heuristic model seems to be âcount words,â
which seems logical at first, doesnât really provide a sense of importance to
many important words.
This one is fairly plain and without many options. It really doesnât give me a
good sense of the book at all. Itâs heuristic model seems to be âcount words,â
which seems logical at first, doesnât really provide a sense of importance to
many important words.
Many EyesThis oneâs neat because itâs got hundreds of different options, which are
actually somewhat overwhelming! You have to register/login to use it. ( For
some reason, UCâs mail system put the registration email in my spam folder.) They
have a lot of visualization tools, including word clouds, word trees, phrase
networks, and social media connections. There are just not as many
customization options as the first 2.
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I was recently browsing through Google Analytics (a tool that measures traffic to this site) and noticed that the most popular page by far is the Word Study Tool. In light of that, I spent 30 minutes sprucing it up to make it look better. I hope you enjoy it. I would eventually like to add more keyboard shortcuts. Presently, the only keyboard shortcuts are the left arrow and the right arrow.
In other news, I also updated the template for the Latinitas Recens page. I’m working on incorporating that dictionary (as well as Whitaker’s Words) as a new source. In the meantime, please enjoy the updated look.
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There was a site outage yesterday due to a power failure. The server was offline for most of the day. I truly apologize for that and for the inconvenience!
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