Universal Dictionary

Universal Dictionary

The Universal Dictionary project seeks to build an all languages, multi-lingual version of bilingual dictionaries.

Most translation dictionaries are bi-lingual or limited to a small number of languages simply it is difficult to represent more than a few languages together in a printed dictionary. A computerized dictionary, however, has no limit on the number of languages that can be represented internally, even if only a few languages are displayed at any one time.

Thus the Universal Dictionary seeks to represent at least all of the facts currently available in all of the published mono-lingual and bi-lingual dictionaries. These facts will be represented in a flexible database structure that will allow a user or application program dynamically to specify a "view" of the data that focuses on particular languages or any other structured query.

One of the principles of the universal dictionary will be that there is a distinguishable word meaning of word sense whenever there is at least one language in which there is more than one translation for what might be written as one definition in a mono-lingual dictionary in the source language. Thus, the universal dictionary distinguishes word senses to a finer resolution than any one language alone.