Latin

Latin is a tool that aims to make working with digitized Latin dictionaries easy.

Introduction

Latin is not exactly a dictionary, but rather a tool that aggregates data from several other dictionaries. It was developed as a tool to help me translate my latin texts and provide me with grammatical information about each word. Furthermore the tool allows the use of regular expressions in case you are uncertain about a part of the word. It allows to search several words at once as I often found the need of several open tabs annoying. At the same time each result is provided with additional links to dictionaries that do not have an open API.

Assignment

The goal was to build an application which would aggregate information from different latin dictionaries in real time. Everything had to be as simple as possible and quick to use.


Box with grammatical information about the wordBox with grammatical information about the word

Solution

The dictionary part of the app uses an analyser Words developed by William Whitaker. Which is open-sourced on Github. This provided the application with reliable source of grammatical information and Latin-English translation data. However, Words is a CLI app, so it was necessary to somewhat connect user with the CLI tool and for that purpose a simple Express.js application was developed. This backend application also searches using regular expressions in plain text document containing all words known to Words.

Later on, when I realised that there is open API for the Dictionary of Medieval Latin the Czech Lands the backend app was extended with results from the mentioned dictionary.