Dictionary of Latin Forms

Created from

William Whitaker’s

WORDS Latin-English Dictionary Program

Logos Bible Software

2012

WORDS data copyright William A. Whitaker, with permission granted for any and all use.

Preface

This Dictionary of Latin Forms for Logos Bible Software was created using William Whitaker’s WORDS Latin-English Dictionary Program. It contains the WORDS output for over 300,000 possible forms taken from important Latin texts in the Logos Library. Each article contains the WORDS output for a particular word form, so that a WORDS lookup can easily be performed on any of these forms from any Logos resource.

Relevant excerpts from the WORDS program documentation are given below. Please note that the caveats given below regarding the limitations of WORDS apply to this resource as well. Behind this dictionary lies an automated lookup that attempts to find any possible valid Latin interpretation of an input word. It is intended as a handy aid to study rather than an authoritative source.

The WORDS program itself, along with complete documentation, may be downloaded for free from http://users.erols.com/whitaker/words.htm.

Excerpt from WORDS Program Documentation

WORDS Version 1.97FC

LATIN-ENGLISH DICTIONARY PROGRAM

SUMMARY

This program, WORDS, takes keyboard input or a file of Latin text lines and provides an analysis of each word individually. It uses an INFLECT.SEC, UNIQUES.LAT, ADDONS.LAT, STEMFILE.GEN, INDXFILE.GEN, and DICTFILE.GEN, and possibly .SPE and DICT.LOC.

The dictionary contains over 39000 entries, as would be counted in an ordinary dictionary. This expands to almost twice that number of individual stems (the count that the program may display at startup), and, through additional word construction with hundreds of prefixes and suffixes, may generate more, leading to many hundreds of thousands of 'words' that can be formed by declension and conjugation. This version of WORDS provides a tool to help in translations for the Latin student. It is now a large dictionary by any measure and can be helpful to advanced users. The dictionary will continue to grow - slowly.

INTRODUCTION

I am no expert in Latin, indeed my training is limited to a couple of years in high school more than 50 years ago. But I always felt that Latin, as presented after two millennia, was a scientific language. It had the interesting property of inflection, words were constructed in a logical manner. I admired this feature, but could never remember the vocabulary well enough when it came time to exercise it on tests.

I decided to automate an elementary-level Latin vocabulary list. As a first stage, I produced a computer program that will analyze a Latin word and give the various possible interpretations (case, person, gender, tense, mood, etc.), within the limitations of its dictionary. This might be the first step to a full parsing system, but, although just a development tool, it is useful by itself.

Please remember that this is only a computer exercise in automating ...