William Whitaker's Words

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William Whitaker's Words is a computer program that parses the inflection or conjugation of a Latin word, and also translates the root into English. Given an English word, the program outputs Latin translations. The software, written in Ada, is free for download but can be used online through several different hosts as well.

This program, especially the online version, has gained popularity among Latinists because of its simple interface, high coverage of the Latin lexicon and mostly accurate results. Nevertheless, the user has to check the results, since Words uses a set of rules based on natural pre-, in-, and suffixation, declension, and conjugation to determine the possibility of an entry. As a consequence of this approach of analysing the structure of words, there is no guarantee that these words were ever used in Latin literature or speech, even if the program finds a possible meaning to a given word.

Coverage

The dictionary is about 39000 entries, as would be counted in an ordinary dictionary. This may generate many hundreds of thousands of 'words' that one can construct over all the declensions and conjugations. The point of this tool is to help in simple translations for a beginning Latin student or amateur.

A few hundred prefixes and suffixes further enlarge the range. These will generate tens of thousands of additional words -- some of which are recognized Latin words, some are perfectly reasonable words which were never used by Cicero or Caesar but might have been used by Augustine or some monk at Jarrow, and some are nonsense.^[1]

In comparison, the Oxford Latin Dictionary, considered to be the most complete Latin lexicon published in the English language, has about 34000 entries, excluding proper names.^[2] The OLD has fewer entries because it only contains entries from Classical Latin, whereas Words contains words from many time periods.

The parsing process

For instance, given the Latin verb form amabantur, Words goes through the following process, to decide its exact translation:

amabantur = am + a + ba + nt + ur, where

• am = amo, amare, amavi, amatus (English to love)
• a = theme vowel for indicative mood
• ba = marker for the imperfect tense
• nt = marker for third person plural number
• ur = marker for passive voice

So amabantur is the passive, 3rd person, plural, imperfect, indicative form of the verb "to love", which would be translated "they were being loved".

See also

• A Latin Dictionary

External links

• Words online
• Words Documentation and Download
• Latin Assistant - Windows Interface for Words

Notes

1. ^ http://lysy2.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/words.exe
2. ^ See http://lysy2.archives.nd.edu/words.htm#1