William Whitaker's Words is a

computer program A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to execute. Computer programs are one component of software, which also includes documentation and other intangible components. A computer program ...

that parses the

inflection In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and ...

conjugation Conjugation or conjugate may refer to: Linguistics * Grammatical conjugation, the modification of a verb from its basic form * Emotive conjugation or Russell's conjugation, the use of loaded language Mathematics * Complex conjugation, the chang ...

of a

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

word, and also translates the

root In vascular plants, the roots are the organs of a plant that are modified to provide anchorage for the plant and take in water and nutrients into the plant body, which allows plants to grow taller and faster. They are most often below the su ...

into English. Given an English word, the program outputs Latin translations. The software, written in

Ada Ada may refer to: Places Africa * Ada Foah, a town in Ghana * Ada (Ghana parliament constituency) * Ada, Osun, a town in Nigeria Asia * Ada, Urmia, a village in West Azerbaijan Province, Iran * Ada, Karaman, a village in Karaman Province, ...

, is free for download but can be used online through several different hosts as well. This program has gained popularity among Latinists because of its simple interface, high coverage of the Latin lexicon and mostly accurate results. Nevertheless, the user has to check the results, since ''WORDS'' uses a set of rules based on natural pre-, in-, and suffixation,

declension In linguistics, declension (verb: ''to decline'') is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and ...

, and

to determine the possibility of an entry. As a consequence of this approach of analysing the structure of words, there is no guarantee that these words were ever used in Latin

literature Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include ...

or speech, even if the program finds a possible meaning to a given word. A few years after the original author's death, the software became the subject of digital preservation efforts.

Coverage

The dictionary consists of about 39,000 entries, which would result in hundreds of thousands of variations, counting declensions and conjugations. Additionally, the dictionary contains prefixes and suffixes. In comparison, the Oxford Latin Dictionary, considered to be the most complete Latin lexicon published in the English language, has about 34,000 entries, excluding proper names.ND.edu
/ref> The Oxford Latin Dictionary has fewer entries because it only contains entries from

Classical Latin Classical Latin is the form of Literary Latin recognized as a literary standard by writers of the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. It was used from 75 BC to the 3rd century AD, when it developed into Late Latin. In some later period ...

, whereas WORDS contains words from many time periods.

Parsing process

For instance, given the Latin

verb A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descr ...

form ''amābantur'', WORDS analyzes it as: amābantur = am + (ā + ba + nt + ur), where *am = amo, amare, amavi, amatus (English ''to

love Love encompasses a range of strong and positive emotional and mental states, from the most sublime virtue or good habit, the deepest interpersonal affection, to the simplest pleasure. An example of this range of meanings is that the love o ...

'') *ā = theme vowel for

indicative mood A realis mood (abbreviated ) is a grammatical mood which is used principally to indicate that something is a statement of fact; in other words, to express what the speaker considers to be a known state of affairs, as in declarative sentences. Most ...

*ba = marker for the

imperfect The imperfect ( abbreviated ) is a verb form that combines past tense (reference to a past time) and imperfective aspect (reference to a continuing or repeated event or state). It can have meanings similar to the English "was walking" or "used to ...

*nt = marker for third person plural

number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers c ...

*ur = marker for

passive Passive may refer to: * Passive voice, a grammatical voice common in many languages, see also Pseudopassive * Passive language, a language from which an interpreter works * Passivity (behavior), the condition of submitting to the influence of o ...

voice The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound producti ...

So ''amābantur'' is the passive, 3rd person, plural, imperfect, indicative form of the verb "to love", which would be translated "they were being loved".

About William Whitaker

William A. Whitaker (1936–2010) was a colonel in the

United States Air Force The United States Air Force (USAF) is the Aerial warfare, air military branch, service branch of the United States Armed Forces, and is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Originally created on 1 August 1907, as a part ...

.{{Cite web, url=https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/66889159, title = COL William Armstrong Whitaker (1936-2010) - Find, website = Find a Grave While at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), he chaired the

High Order Language Working Group The High Order Language Working Group (HOLWG) was a working group instrumental in developing the Ada computer programming language. The group was established in 1975 with the goal of establishing a single high-level programming language appropriate ...

that recommended development of the computer language

, in which WORDS is written. An accomplished Latinist, he created the translation software called WORDS after his retirement from the forces.

External links

Preservation effort
(archived)
Words onlineSource codeInterpres
Words for

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

Legible Latin
Multi-Platform Words Program;

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

.
A Digital Latin Dictionary
Whitaker's Words for Kindle.
Android Port of Words

Notes

Pedagogy Online dictionaries Latin dictionaries 1993 software Free software programmed in Ada

Coverage

Parsing process

About William Whitaker

See also

External links

Notes