I'm not sure the need for this is immediately apparent, or, for that matter, if the thing doesn't already exist in some form or another, but what I have in mind is a collation of all human words into one dictionary, with their English meanings. Or whichever language you prefer as the common one. This would be a metadictionary, and as various languages are falling away, maybe it would be a good information project. The dictionary would have, simply, all the words that people now use (Esperanto. Korean. Latin. French. Ancient Greek. Hindi. Sumerian. Klingon. Chinese, Hochdeutsch, Basque etc. etc.), or have used, or know about, arranged alphabetically, with indications of what they mean. If nothing else, it would be a really cool publishing project--picture the Oxford English Dictionary expanded to include everybody's words. Big book. May already exist in some form as translation software. (Later: The questions about alphabetization imply a standardized format. Is there such a thing in linguistic circles? I imagined anglicized versions of the entries. That Ghoti won't hunt, I guess...)
-- cloudface, Jan 12 2004

I suggested a custom.dic peer-to-peer collection agent a while back (which would do this job for us, sans the definitions). Words that appear in a lot of custom.dics (e.g. >1000) are included.
-- neilp, Jan 12 2004


I never metadictionary I didn't like.
-- phundug, Jan 12 2004


Better make sure you provide a good interface, if it's going to be computerised. Would there be a multi-language thesaurus also? (+)
-- silverstormer, Jan 12 2004


If you want a stop-gap until this is developed, there are a lot of online dictionaries for different languages. It shouldn't be too hard to write an application that queries every one with your given word (OneLook.com does this for about 30 English dictionaries). That should provide 50 languages at least.

But I wonder if there are many languages which still have no dictionary at all. Doubtless, quite a few are only described in obscure academic articles.
-- kropotkin, Jan 12 2004


If you are going to alphabetize all words. What is the preference of charcter set, also is it even possible to have an alphabetical listing of languages such as ancient Egyptian?
-- silverstormer, Jan 12 2004



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