This site offers helpful tools for students of the Latin language.
Latin-to-English shows results from both the Whitaker's Words dictionary and Lewis and Short's A Latin Dictionary. Inflected words are parsed automatically.
Grammar analysis shows the possible grammatical functions of any word.
Latin Reader
Regarding the Reader: A helper for reading Latin texts. We must always learn Latin from the dictionary, and this keeps the dictionary before our eyes. From a few words, to a paragraph, to an entire chapter or book. Paste your text in, and it will be reformatted line-by-line, with the relevant dictionary entries prepared beneath each line in a smaller font. I developed this to give my first-year Latin students a boost in their efforts. It has proved immensely useful in creating homework sheets, and on the projector screen for classroom work. Once you have some basic familiarity with grammar, it will enable you to breeze through longer texts without needing to pause to look up unknown words. Example:
Details about Latin Reader
When one word yields multiple possible dictionary entries, they are presented in a reverse-enumerated list. This is to cue the eye up-front as to how many choices are coming.
View-in-Browser option: This works well for personal study, or in a classroom with a projector.
Download as RTF: RTF files can be opened in Word or OpenOffice for printing or creating homework sheets. I chose RTF because it permits the complex single / multi column formatting we need.
Condensed Output eliminates newlines, Preserve Layout respects them, and Sentence Mode breaks all text down into individual sentences. In study and classroom settings, it is good to tackle the text one sentence at a time. Every Latin sentence is an adventure!
The blank-lines feature is pretty self-explanatory and is mostly useful when creating homework sheets, to provide a space above each line for the student to write their translation.
The main dictionary used is William Whitaker's Words. Some definitions have been editied for simplicity.
You can also use Lewis & Short: A Latin Dictionary, from the plain-text version available here. (Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from The National Endowment for the Humanities. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/lexica/ 11-15-2022.) The software attempts to display only the initial portion of each entry, as these tend to be quite long. If you download the RTF file with the Lewis and Short dictionary, all text will first be converted to ascii and all accents removed. This is because of problems with encoding which I have not solved yet.
"Omit the __ most common words." This feature is highly recommended for non-beginners as it leaves blank the entries for words you are likely to already know. Using the Frequency Tool it was possible to generate a list of what are more or less the most common words in Latin (et, qui, facere, dicere, et alia). This removes unneeded material from the screen.
“Display vocab in __ columns.” Four seems to work well but maybe you want something else. Defaults to 3 for smaller screens.
The few other features are largely self-explanatory.
Word Frequency Table Generator
The Word Frequency Tool generates vocabulary lists from (very) large texts. It determines which dictionary entries are referenced, and sorts these by most frequently cited. It can be useful for focusing on the most common words in a given text. Obviously there will also be some false positives in the results, as it casts the net as widely as possible. A word like est, for example, will be flagged as both sum,esse and edo,esse.
General Updates
January 2024: Added filtering for nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs to the frequency list generator.
December 2023: Due to host platform requirements, we had to obtain a new domain name. Now operating at latinlens.org. The old ll.latinlens.repl.co expired in March, 2024.
October 2023: Increased vocabulary of English-to-Latin dictionary. Added basic support for numbers (digits) in Latin-to-English.
September 2023: Better support for downloading Windows or Mac compatible RTF (Rich Text Format) files. These are meant to be opened in Word or OpenOffice. If one download format doesn't display properly for you, try the other.
August 2023: Added support for numbers (digits) in English to Latin.
Source code for the website is freely available upon request.
