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.

Multiple Sources and Multiple Dictionaries Online

It took almost a year of work to get this new source system online. It's done! Or at least what clients (that's you) can see is done.

As of right now, with any luck, if you look down in the bottom-right corner of your browser, you should see a source box.

[If not, press SHIFT+F5 on your keyboard or upgrade to the most recent version of your browser or clear  you web cache/temporary internet files.]

With this new feature you can control which dictionaries your Latin words come from. As of right now, the old Lewis Elementary is online as well as the Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary (the original basis for the OLD). You can also control which priority your words come from.

This feature is a long time coming, but there still may be bugs. If there are, please let me know! I hope you enjoy this feature.

Here are a couple of things to note. 1) Macrons are slightly different in the LNS than in the LEM. 2) I haven't tweaked any of the words in the LNS, so there is potentially a lot more bad data there (which I will eventually fix with your help). 3) Whitaker's Words and Latinitas Recens will be online soon.

UPDATE: One thing I forgot to mention is that the LNS includes about 50,000 headwords compared to about 17,000 in the LEM. SO ... there are a lot more words!

DNS Lookups Cause Site Slowness

As per the usual, I've been tinkering with the back-end from time to time. Things slowly and silently improve -- well, hopefully!

Right now I'm at the University of Kentucky participating in an intensive conversational Latin seminar. Intense is the appropriate word. Today is day 2 of the seminar itself, although I've been here since the 4th of July. We'll see how my Latin improves after 10 days of immersion.

Since I've been here at UKY I found a bug -- well, a performance issue. Some Universities (like this one) don't put individual host names in DNS for their various thousands of connections. UNM happens to be one that does. Normally, my web server is set to perform a DNS lookup on every single connection (inefficient, I know). For a normal internet connection (say, a UNM student or a home Comcast user), that lookup takes microseconds. In the case of UKY, that lookup took 6 seconds ... to timeout. That timeout happened every single time the browser connected. Needless to say, this site must seem incredibly slow at a University like this. I can verify that it did for the short time it was affecting me.

So, to all the UKY students out there ... I apologize for the slowness. I also apologize to all the users of this site who experienced the ... shall we call it a mismatched configuration? On a pleasant note, this was a truly easy situation to resolve. One # (hash) sign in the config file and all is well. C'est la vie? Oui. Or in Latin, perhaps Re vera est? Ita.

Incidentally, I clean up words on the back-end on a regular basis. Since I've been intensely studying here, I've been catching a few more errors than usual!

I also had a suggestion to incorporate the full Lewis and Short dictionary into this site. Great idea! I'm looking into it now.