Words Latin English dictionary and analyzer, and Latin Assistant GUI for Words


“Words” is a free Latin-English-Latin dictionary. It takes keyboard input or a file of Latin text lines and provides an analysis/morphology (declension, conjugation, case, tense, etc.) of each word individually, the dictionary form, and the translation (meaning).

The dictionary contains over 39000 entries 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. Present emphasis is on classical Latin and late Latin, but medieval Latin entries are increasing. WORDS provides a tool to help in translations for the Latin student and a memory jog for researchers. It includes the Melissa Calepinus Novus dictionary of Guy Licoppe.

The codes for inflections are in the documentation, however it is expected that the user will have a few weeks of introductory Latin in order to be able to interpret the results beyond the simple meaning.

WORDS runs on all systems as a console program (keyboard entry), without Windows GUI. If you are not familiar with DOS (or just don’t like it), you can download Latin Assistant, a free Windows interface for WORDS. This GUI also makes it easier to perform some other tasks: not only looking up Latin and English words, but also printing entries and saving your current session as a text file. A “meanings only” mode allows using the program primarily as a dictionary. By default, morphological properties are given for every word you type in.