Friday, December 19, 2008

Latin-English Lexicons: WORDS and Perseus and more (including Accordance, BibleWorks, Logos)

If you work with Latin, there are a number of Latin-English lexical resources available, most for free.Whitaker's WORDS has about 39,000 entries and provides analysis and gloss. You can use it online HERE at this NotreDame site. You can download a version (for DOS, Win, Mac, Linux) HERE. Even better, download the WORDS version from that link, then get the Latin Assistant 2.0 from HERE. As the screenshot above shows, it provides a much more user-friendly interface and note that you can enter forms of words and have the morphological data provided as well as the meanings.. [HT: the amazing Pasquale]
Another site to check for an implementation of WORDS is the Classics Technology Center which has both a Latin to English and English to Latin option.Perseus provides both Charlton T. Lewis', An Elementary Latin Dictionary (search page) and the more comprehensive Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (search page). Perseus has all sorts of ways of linking the Latin to primary texts, as you can see in the graphic, but it can run slow. It is also able to search on forms in addition to the lexical entries.
(UPDATE) The best way to access Lewis and Short (as I should have noted originally since I highlighted it before!) is by using the free
Diogenes program that runs on your computer. It's a 64Mb download that expands to over 500Mb, but it is an excellent resource.
NOTE: Accordance, BibleWorks, and Logos allow for hooks into the internet, so you could set up links from Latin texts in those programs into the NotreDame or Perseus sites. If someone knows how to set links or run scripts from the Bible software to either Latin Assistant or Diogenes, that would be very nice.
Note the Latin lexical resources available in a number of Bible software packages (and check this post for links):

  • Accordance offers a morphologically tagged version of the Vulgate along with a simple Latin-English dictionary.
  • Logos includes in a number of its libraries The Dictionary of the Vulgate New Testament by J. M. Harden, but the Latin Vulgate texts in Logos are not morphologically analyzed, so there is no direct link from the Latin to the dictionary. You can link to NotreDame or Perseus mentioned above.
  • BibleWorks has a number of Vulgate and other Latin texts but does not include a lexicon. You will have to link out to NotreDame or Perseus mentioned above. (Or wait for something nice from Pasquale...) UPDATE (2013): BibleWorks9 does include the VULM version which is linked to Whitaker's Words so that any Latin word in a verse has morphological and lexical info available in the analysis window.
  • VulSearch and LaParola both have morphologically tagged Vulgate versions and include Whitaker's Words within the programs.

2 comments:

  1. You missed one that takes the lexical power of Perseus' Lewis & Short and speeds things up:

    Diogenes does both Greek and Latin.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Actually, check out June 11, 2008 (http://bibleandtech.blogspot.com/2008/06/great-scott-perseus-full-lsj-and-lewis.html)

    ReplyDelete