Global Glossary: probably the biggest dictionary in the world

It is time I introduced the readers of my blog (all three of them) to my new pet project: a website that claims to be – probably – the biggest dictionary in the world. The website, called Global Glossary, is a collection of bilingual glossaries in 95 languages and contains over 25 million entries.

Global Glossary’s content originates from collaboratively edited sources such as Wiktionary, OmegaWiki, the FreeDict project as well as countless others. The value of Global Glossary is that it merges all these sources into a single coherent whole and makes them all searchable in one place.

I designed Global Glossary for people like myself, people who need to juggle several languages in their lives. Sometimes, when you are looking for ideas on how to express a thought that originated in another language, the size of your dictionary can make a difference. So I said to myself, wouldn’t it be great if I could build a huge database where all the lexical data I can get my hands on would be accessible in one place, without having to hunt up and down the Web every time I want to look something up?

Because Global Glossary is based on content contributed by volunteers, a certain percentage of errors is to be expected. I have done informal spot-checks in the languages I can read and understand myself, end even though there were some imperfections, I found the quality to be more than acceptable. Any errors are far outweighed by the sheer volume of good-quality, useful content that Global Glossary makes available.

My plan is to update Global Glossary regularly to keep it synchronized with the sources from which it draws its data. I also want to keep adding new sources and new languages; anybody who knows of a good source of bilingual glossaries that has not been included in Global Glossary yet is encouraged to get in touch with me.

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