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.

A Bug Fix for the Source Box

In the lower-right corner you should see a "source" box. Sometimes that source box disappears when users sign on. I tracked down that bug and squashed it! Hopefully it's working better for you, but if it's not, please let me know.

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!

The big day is coming ... New Sources!

I've finished the preliminary data load from Lewis and Short's "A Latin Dictionary". For those interested, there are approximately 51500 lemmata* (compared to 17500 in the Lewis Elementary).

The data is not live for users yet, so you won't be able to see the new data. But I wanted to tell you about this great breakthrough that I've made. The data needs a little bit more massaging to be considered production ready, but it's very, very clean data so far. I spent several weeks mining the data, and my heuristic algorithms** are getting pretty smart. A few more tweaks!

The big news is how this is going to affect the dictionary. I plan on adding a smart option-box in the bottom right-hand corner that will do two things. 1) List which dictionaries are available for searching and 2) allow the user (that's you!) to change the order in which they are searched and turn them on or off. You can see my mockup of this concept to the right. (Incidentally, this is my first post with graphics!)

The biggest benefit of the LNS (Lewis and Short) dictionary is that it contains 3 times the number of words -- granted, most of them are proper names and place names, but sometimes it's nice to know who and where those crazy ancient authors are talking about.

Keep your eyes peeled. It will only be a matter of weeks until this new data is live!

*For those who don't have experience in the field of lexicography, a lemma is a "head word" ...
** Experience-based methods ...