Greek dictionary shortcuts for my browser

Greek Learning Greek
1

I have the following search shortcuts defined for Chrome. I’m on OS X, and have a hotkey to switch to the Greek polytonic keyboard quickly, so I can just type a word into my browser to look it up. So if I want to find the forms of λύω, I type the following into my browser bar:

lg λύω (or λγ λύω)

To copy any of these, go to Settings, Manage Search Engines. Use whatever shortcut and name you’d like, but copy the code section exactly.

Dictionary: Lexigram
Description: Best dictionary on the web for finding morphology. Accepts declined forms as well as dictionary forms.
Shortcuts: lg, λγ
Search:

http://www.lexigram.gr/lex/arch/%s

Dictionary: Woodhouse
Description: Useful looking up English words for translation.
Shortcuts: wo, ςο
Search:

http://artflsrv02.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/efts/dicos/woodhouse_test.pl?keyword=%s&pagenumber=&sortorder=Keyword

Dictionary: Perseus
Description: Accepts declined and dictionary forms. Has the LSJ online, with some headword bugs.
Shortcuts: gr, γρ
Search:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=%s&la=greek

Dictionary: Perseus Latin
Shortcuts: la
Search:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=%s&la=la

Dictionary: Perseus Chicago Texts
Description: Look up a line in a given text like “Hom. Il. 5.50”
Shortcuts: pe
Search:

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi/citequery3.pl?query=%s&dbname=GreekFeb2011

Dictionary: Logeion
Description: Has a scroll bar, so it’s useful if you don’t know exactly which headword you are looking for.
Shortcuts: lo, λο
Search:

http://logeion.uchicago.edu/index.html#%s
2

Hi Joel,

It’s not that you could bare-bone, retro-engineer the Woodhouse page and make the software available so that we may create other searchable dictionaries? I’m thinking of Frädersdorff, Yonge, &c.

3

It shouldn’t be to hard to reverse engineer Woodhouse, but I believe that if you were to contact Helma Dik at Chicago, she might be able to simply share the code with you.

Also, this is my new favorite browser extension: http://www.paideiainstitute.org/chiron

Like the Google Translate extension for modern languages (but better), the above extension lets you look up individual words by double-clicking.

4

I actually wrote to the library and got the following answer:

That is an ancient perl script which is not really suitable for distribution. You might want to have a peek at:
http://logeion.uchicago.edu/
and the related
http://perseus.uchicago.edu/
for Greek resources. Some of these are powered by our open source PhiloLogic package or variants such as
http://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/content/dictionnaires-dautrefois
and
http://dvlf.uchicago.edu/

If I were going to look for off the shelf software, I suppose I would start with
http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict
or the more recent
http://goldendict.org/
but I have not used them myself.

Hope this helps.

But something simpler would be even better for me, e.g. http://lexica.linguax.com/

5

I was going to write up some python, but here’s a no-code solution that will be about the same about of work.

  1. Break your PDF dictionary up into pages with imagemagick. Something like:
convert -monitor -verbose -density 300 <your_file>.pdf -compress Zip -quality 100 "%03d.jpg"

  1. create a directory on your local machine or server. Let’s call it “dictionary/”

  2. create an images directory “dictionary/images/” and populate it with all of the individual files from your PDF.

  3. create a file in dictionary/index.html that is just a series of links

<a href="./images/001.jpg">ἄλφα...ἀάω</a>
<a href="./images/002.jpg">ἄβα...ἄβολος</a>
...

Optional 1) Link each letter of the alphabet at the top to an anchor in the page for that letter

Optional 2) It is possible to write some javascript to allow a user to type in a word and find the correct link automatically. But you still have to make the list above by hand [‘001’] → [‘ἄλφα’, ‘ἀάω’], etc., so that the code can know what page a word would be on.