The general format would be: (1) simple definitions, (2) simple examples (mostly ‘made-up’ – but correct - Latin, using a restricted vocab), and (3) pictures. What would that include? Well, just cull all the items from the vocab lists at the back of the plethora of intermediate textbooks past and present (including Oerberg). What I long for is a Latin-Latin dictionary at intermediate level. There's a reason why the monolingual Latin dictionaries listed above are out-of-date-no one has attempted this for a long time.Īnd an accurate monolingual Latin dictionary wouldn't be all that helpful anyway, because the user would have to put in the time and effort to unscramble the Latin.Īctually, I find I have to put in the time and effort to unscramble the Latin in the big English-Latin dictionaries anyway - with all those untranslated quotations. And words such as intellego or possum or contraho. Just think about what definitions of words such as caput or eo, ire would look like. A Latin-English dictionary that offers a range of English equivalents is easier to use and much more helpful and effective in learning Latin. This wouldn't be easy for common words-words that we never bother to look up in English monolingual dictionaries-and for more abstract words with a range of subtly differentiated meanings it would be even more difficult.
#Monolingual dictionary online full
On the other hand, writing accurate definitions that capture the full range of meanings for each Latin head-word would be an enormous and expensive task, and a half-baked effort would be worse than useless-it would be misleading and unreliable.Īnd an accurate monolingual Latin dictionary wouldn't be all that helpful anyway, because the user would have to put in the time and effort to unscramble the Latin. Translating such a dictionary into Latin would simply mean substituting the Latin head-words for the English equivalents, which would not be helpful at all. Latin-English dictionaries such as the Elementary Lewis, or the big Lewis and Short or Oxford Latin Dictionary, for that matter, provide English equivalents for Latin words, not definitions. Citations from classical authors would remain untouched, as they are already in Latin, obviously. Translations could be taken from the four monolingual dictionaries I mentioned, so volunteers wouldn't need to be expert Latinists, only advanced enough to find appropriate Latin definitions in other dictionaries to replace the English ones. I'm wondering if it would be feasible to crowdsource the translation of the Elementary Lewis, which is in the public domain. So I was thinking of how it would be nice to have an intermediate monolingual dictionary, something that will fit within 1000 pages. If I consider the dictionaries I actually use on a daily basis, the one I use most frequently is the Elementary Lewis for classical authors and the abridged Gaffiot (de poche) for later authors. Both are quite dated and do not compare very well to modern dictionaries. Étienne's work is also too big, and Gesner's is borderline. Wagner is more of phrasebook than a dictionary, and it may not qualify as monolingual since all the editions I've seen include translations into another language, usually German or French.įorcellini's is simply too big to be really useful, and it's being supplanted by the TLL which is even bigger.
Forcellini's Totius Latinitatis Lexicon
As many of you know, there is currently no monolingual Latin dictionary in print.Īmong those out of print, there are the following:
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