Ideas for Lexicompatible Dictionaries

The Dictionary Resource and Idea Page for our Third-party Developers!

We researched the format of technical and popular dictionaries and discovered that most of them can be adapted to Lexicompatible format. Even those with many illustrations would work well. And, since we enhanced Lexicographer with a special IPA-superset pronunciation font, you can do sophisticated general language references. But many dictionaries don't use pronunciations, which greatly speeds up development time and simplifies the creation of the dictionary tag files.

Most dictionaries, glossaries and indexes can be turned into Lexicompatible dictionary modules. Even some of the bibliographic dictionaries will work, as long as they don't require a large number of lookup keys (for specialized multi-key dictionaries, a relational database would be more appropriate than Lexicographer).

One of the best ways to get ideas for creating Lexicompatible dictionaries are to browse a library or bookstore. Since many of these are online, we're setting up links that give you a sense of how many thousands of dictionaries there are, and how many excellent opportunities are available for dictionary module developers. Links also provide information on publishing date, author and publisher, which you might want if you intend to acquire electronic publication rights to an existing dictionary.

By the way, it's not often we endorse a company online, but we've found that Powell's Technical Book Store and general book store (a couple of blocks away) in Portland, Oregon, to be exceptional! It has dictionaries on almost every shelf in the store, shelves that reach to the ceilings, and more electronic reference book ideas than we could implement in a dozen lifetimes!

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Quicklink to University of Washington Library lists hundreds of dictionaries, glossaries and indexes, many of which would make excellent Lexicompatible products.

There are some interesting online dictionaries whose authors might be willing to create a version (or grant rights) for use on personal computers. Since they've already done most of the work, conversion would be straightforward, to Lexicompatible format. Take a look at this online dictionaries site.

Technical/Scientific

Coming soon.

Historical/Scholarly

Coming soon.