Greetings all,

Just a quick note that there's been a new release of the ESPDIC (Esperanto-English Dictionary project), with the total number of entries now at 63,213.

Please also try the (relatively new) online search tool, which allows you to search ESPDIC using regular expressions. As always, you can download the complete dictionary as a single Unicode text file as well.

Corrections, suggestions, etc. are always warmly welcome.

Amike,

Paul

pdenisowski:Just a quick note that there's been a new release of the ESPDIC (Esperanto-English Dictionary project), with the total number of entries now at 63,213.

Handsomely done, Paul. Thank you.

Fantastic! I love the search tool.

Multan dankon!

Rejsi:Fantastic! I love the search tool.

Thanks. I'm planning to add an "advanced search tool" that's basically a plan-language way to use regular expressions, e.g. have options such as "exact match" or "case insensitive" or "English|Esperanto only". Some of these can be done with regular expressions now (e.g. ^vorto to match only lines starting with "vorto" ), but language-specific searching, etc. needs new code.

Since I'm very new to PHP (more of a Matlab/C/Perl guy ...) this might take a little while, but I would love any feedback on features that should be in the "advanced search" tool.

Amike,

Paul

pdenisowski:Greetings all,

Just a quick note that there's been a new release of the ESPDIC (Esperanto-English Dictionary project), with the total number of entries now at 63,213.

Please also try the (relatively new) online search tool, which allows you to search ESPDIC using regular expressions. As always, you can download the complete dictionary as a single Unicode text file as well.

Corrections, suggestions, etc. are always warmly welcome.

Amike,

Paul

What's the license of your dictionary?

Gleki:What's the license of your dictionary?

It's listed on the ESPDIC homepage, but here it is again (verbatim) :

In order to encourage its use in the Esperanto community, ESPDIC (Esperanto English Dictionary) by Paul Denisowski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. What this means is that anyone can use, transmit, or modify ESPDIC for any purpose, including commercial purposes, as long as the source is properly attributed.

So essentially you can use it any way you like, even for commercial purposes -- all that's required is that you attribute (acknowledge) the source.

For example, there are TWO printed versions of ESDPIC done by different persons and both are being sold by Amazon. Neither of these required my permission or approval, even though they are clearly "for-profit" uses of ESPDIC -- all they had to do was indicate where the dictionary came from.

My goal in ESPDIC is not to make money or "control" the dictionary in any way -- it's simply my small contribution to the Esperanto community. The only reason I ask for an attribution / acknowledgement of ESPDIC is because I hope that will create more awareness of the project and increase its usefulness even more.

Hope that helps.

Amike,

Paul

Incidentally, regarding licensing of ESPDIC, I received a very interesting email from someone at Google (!) last month :

My name is [removed] and I work for the international Product partnerships team in Google. I'm currently working on the development and integration of small languages for Google Translate. One of our priority language is Esperanto.

The reason why I'm contacting you is to find out whether you were able to license and supply bilingual Esperanto to English bilingual dictionary data.

If not, maybe you might be aware of other providers that I could contact in that purpose ?

I answered that the ESPDIC license basically allows them to use it any way they like, all that I ask is small acknowledgement (perhaps on the "About Google Translate" page). Haven't heard anything back since then, but it's good to know that Esperanto is a "priority lanaguage" (at least among "small languages" ) for Google Translate.

Amike,
Paul

Thanks for your hard work! Your espdic.txt file ( with a simple java wrapper for searching ) has been sitting in the corner of my screen for almost a year now. It's my main tool I use while reading Esperanto. Vortaro.net has more detail, but if I just need a fast reminder about a word, espdic.txt is what I use. It is fantastic. It's amazing that one person could create an entire dictionary on their own. I doubt I know 6K words in English, much less 63K in Esperanto!

Since you asked about features, one thing I personally could really use is some sort of (tr)/(ntr) designation for verbs to see at a glance the transitivity. For example:

esti : (ntr) to be
fari : (tr) to achieve, act, do, make, perform

Or even just a single character like > means transitive, < means intransitive, or something. This is probably the main reason I have to look up verbs in vortaro.net rather than espdic, because unless they end in -iĝi or -igi, you just can't tell for sure by looking at them. Besides the definition itself, transitivity the most important thing about a verb. But it's not built into the language specifically by regular fixed endings unlike most other parts of speech, so it needs to be stated in the definition.

Just a thought! Cheers!

eric_vandenburg:It's amazing that one person could create an entire dictionary on their own.

It's not as unusual as you think. I've been a user of and a (small) contributor to Jim Breen's EDICT Japanese-English dictionary since the 1990s. I even started a small Japanese-English dictionary of computing and telecom terms (COMPDIC) which was eventually folded into Jim's dictionary.

Ideally, I would very much like ESPDIC to become like Jim's EDICT or my earlier CEDICT (Chinese-English dictionary), where the majority of new entries come from the larger community rather than being added/entered by one individual. Now that the dictionary has reached the size of a large paper dictionary, almost all new entries will come from my own reading in Esperanto and translation of PIV entries not currently in ESPDIC (about 20,000!).

eric_vandenburg:
Since you asked about features, one thing I personally could really use is some sort of (tr)/(ntr) designation for verbs to see at a glance the transitivity.

One of the nicest things about Esperanto is that the parts of speech can be determined from the forms, but you're absolutely right with regards to the transitivity of verbs. Although I may someday do this (after I'm retired ...), in the short term what I would really like to do is have a lot of usage examples which would help to show how the words are used and from which one would at least get a hint as to the transitivity.

For example, if you search for "^fari " you'll get a number of examples that show that fari is in fact transitive :

fari bieron : to brew
fari diklipon : to pout
fari distingon inter : to make a distinction among
ktp.

Again, I'll admit that it's not the same as having verbs clearly marked tr or itr, but hopefully it's a little useful

Thanks for the feedback!

Amike,

Paul

pdenisowski:

...a lot of usage examples which would help to show how the words are used and from which one would at least get a hint as to the transitivity.

For example, if you search for "^fari " you'll get a number of examples that show that fari is in fact transitive :

fari bieron : to brew

That kind of search is very helpful now that you point it out! Thanks! It occurs to me that one could also search espdic for the presence of only one or the other of igi/iĝi forms. Ex: A search on ^boli returns boligi but not boliĝi, a clue that boli is probably intr. and must be specifically made tr. But ^bani returns baniĝi and not banigi, indicating the opposite. It won't work in every case ( fari -> farigi & fariĝi ) but at any rate your dictionary just became even more useful with no changes at all!