Online Latin Dictionaries

So there are a good handful of decent Latin-English dictionaries online. Well... 'decent' is a relative term. Let's look at some of the more well-known; and while this review is in no way comprehensive, it does cover the sorts of online dictionaries that classroom Latin teachers would come across.

The first is the Notre Dame Latin Dictionary. It's not that it's a bad resource, it's just that it's unnecessarily difficult for lower level students to use. The problem is two-fold: 1) students must be able to produce the stems to get accurate information (while it is of course ideal that they know stems, well,...) 2) searches produce a wide range of results, but each comes with little semantic information. While it might seem like a quick resource, I've found many beginning students hit a wall when relying on this word book.

Second is the 'lexicon' tool on Perseus. They've got the English entries to Lewis and Short which could be great for composition lessons, but the searches produce bewilderingly varied results (see this search for the English word 'dog'). The Latin headword entries in Lewis and Short work much better, though the table of 'instances' in the Latin Corpus may appear a bit overwhelming at first. However, as we'll take a look at later down the road, this function makes for an impressive philological tool for upper level students as well as scholars.

Finally comes Whitaker's Words. Simplicity is the key here, and I've found that first and second year students find Whitaker to be rather 'comforting' and straightforward. My biggest gripe is that the online version looks like it was designed on an Atari. While the online version of the program is passable, I'd suggest you download the spiffy new version from University of Arizona. Be warned, however, this version is just for Mac (and occasionally does not mount properly on your computer)!

Among the others floating around out there are super-simple Java applets like this one at University of British Columbia, and commercial versions like this one which is from a company called Babylon and is rather nice in that it includes cognates and links to Italian, French, and other dictionaries.

It is funny though that here we are in 2008 and we still don't have a straight-forward, easy-to-use, comprehensive Latin-English-Latin Online Dictionary. I see this as a great opportunity.