Lexicon
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The lexicon is the heart of a project: each record is a lexeme — the word, part of speech, senses, etymology, stems and inflected forms, pronunciations, script forms, relations and tags.
1. Sub-pages and modes {#1-sub-pages-and-modes}
- Entries: the list plus the inspector.
- Statistics (pick a language in the top bar first): layout and interaction are described in Common conventions. It shows the total number of entries; the number and share with a definition / pronunciation / etymology / inflected forms / images / relations; entries that do and don’t occur in the corpus; the number of senses; average word length; identical headwords; recent additions. Distributions are by part of speech, tag, initial letter, word length, etymology type, dialect and each dimension (part of speech, tag, initial letter and dimensions are clickable and filter the list); the ranking shows the entries used most in the corpus, and clicking one jumps to it.
- Parts of speech & dimensions: define parts of speech (name, abbreviation, bound paradigms, stem slots, the components of a compound part of speech) and grammatical dimensions (such as “number: singular / plural” or “case: nominative / accusative / locative”, each value with a name and abbreviation). All of this is project data; the software presets no terminology.
- Renames follow through: an entry’s stems are stored under the stem slot’s name, and its inflected forms under the slot name (value names joined with
.). When you rename a stem slot or a dimension value and leave the input, content stored under the old name in every entry that uses it moves to the new name, and the lexicon’s columns, scripts’ Transcribe from and stem names written in paradigm pipelines change too; a toast says how many entries were moved. Anything already stored under the new name is left alone. Part-of-speech names and abbreviations and dimension names are stored by internal ID anyway, so renaming them shows up in the lexicon immediately. - Stem slots: which stems entries of this part of speech have, for example a noun’s strong / middle / weak forms or a verb’s stem vowel. Give each slot a name and a description (where it comes from, how it’s used) and add slots with + Stem slot. In Edit mode, entries of this part of speech list one stem input per slot, and the stem drop-down in paradigm pipelines offers these slots.
- Compound parts of speech: add a few parts of speech under Made of below a part-of-speech card to make it a compound, for example “noun/verb” for a word that is both (if you haven’t changed its name and abbreviation, they are built automatically from the components, like
noun/verbandn./v.). The chips under Made of can be dragged to change their order, and an unchanged name and abbreviation are rebuilt to match. If a compound part of speech has no paradigm or stem slots of its own, those of its components are used (the first component with a paradigm); filtering by part of speech,pos=searches and the part-of-speech filter of lexicon evolution all take the components into account. - Dimensions for some parts of speech only: add parts of speech under used for on a dimension card, and entry editing only lists the dimensions that fit (dimensions that already have a value are still shown); with none selected, the dimension applies to all parts of speech.
- Inspector modules: click Add module at the bottom of the page to add a kind of content the lexicon doesn’t have by itself — variant characters of a logographic script, cultural notes, geographical distribution — without waiting for the software to add fields for your language. Give each module a title (per gloss language), choose whether its content is “a piece of text” or “a list of items (separated by 、)”, and choose where it goes on the entry card: above the senses / between senses and etymology (default) / below the etymology / at the very bottom. Used for can restrict it to certain languages, Font can display it in a script’s font (useful for variant characters), and Column names also recognised on import lists column headers that may appear in spreadsheets.
In Edit mode the input appears at the same position; on the entry card it shows as a section (a list shows one box per item). The top-bar search accepts
title=text, and Columns in the lexicon can add the module as a column. Deleting a module deletes what every entry filled in for it; this can be undone. - Collapse one by one: each part of speech, dimension and inspector module has a small triangle in front of it that folds it into a single line — name, abbreviation, followed in small print by its bound paradigms, stem slots, values and the parts of speech it applies to. Collapse all / Expand all next to each section title folds or unfolds the whole section. Collapsed states are remembered on this computer.
- Renames follow through: an entry’s stems are stored under the stem slot’s name, and its inflected forms under the slot name (value names joined with
The Entries sub-page has two modes:
- View mode: the inspector shows a read-only entry card with a clean layout, good for looking things up — headword, script, pronunciation, part of speech, dimension values, senses, tags, etymology, history, stems, inflected forms, relations, derived words and your own inspector modules. Etymology, history, stems and inflected forms are each a block of their own (the inflected-forms block only lists what the paradigm produced; stems are a separate block), and the card’s font sizes and block order are set block by block in Theme → Entry card; the symbols around pronunciations (
/…/,[…], none) are chosen in Settings → Application. A sense’s registers show as boxed labels (one character in Chinese, such as文; abbreviations in English, such aslit.); Settings → Register labels on entry cards can switch to full names. When a sense has its own part of speech that differs from the entry’s (common for entries with a compound part of speech), its abbreviation (e.g.n.) is shown faintly before the definition. Example sentences are listed below the card, separated by a rule. Every word on the card can be clicked to jump to it. - Edit mode: the inspector becomes a form for editing field by field.
History : in View mode there may be a History row between the entry card and the example sentences, stringing together the forms this word went through from its source, such as PAe kasu → CAe kaso → Ae kaso. It appears when the etymology source is an entry, a morpheme, or a custom source whose language name matches a language or a historical stage, and some sound-change rule set has every stage marker from the source’s stage to this entry’s stage bound to a language (or a stage of a language). The label before each form is the stage abbreviation, or else the language abbreviation, or else the stage marker’s name; the rule set’s name at the start of the row opens that rule set. If the final result doesn’t match the entry’s spelling, mismatch is shown next to it (hover it for “running the sound changes to the end does not give this entry’s spelling; check the rules or the etymology”). In the default block order, History sits between the etymology and the stems; if you’d rather not see it, Settings → Application → Display → Show the history row on entry cards hides the whole block (it is on by default).
Correcting a step: click the form of the step that came out wrong, type the right one and press Enter (or click elsewhere) — it is stored as an etymology stage, and every later step is re-derived from it. A corrected step is shown in the accent colour with a small pencil after it, and the ↺ next to it (Back to the derived form) takes the correction back; typing the derived form in again, or clearing the box, does the same. Only the lexicon inspector lets you edit — hover cards and the start-page gallery just show the row.
At the top there is also a Relation graph button : a graph centred on the current word showing derivation, composition, cognates, near-synonyms and other relations; click a node to switch to it. Concatenated forms in custom sources and stages (gēs-sal, a + b, x·y) are split into several nodes, and each piece is looked up in the source language as an entry or morpheme of the same form; pieces that are found can be clicked — that is how you jump across languages. Forms are compared ignoring diacritics and case, as well as the source language’s “characters ignored in fuzzy matching” (see Languages). After clicking a word in another language, Back returns you to the entry in the original language.
- Pan and zoom: press and drag empty space to move the canvas; Ctrl + scroll wheel zooms around the pointer; the three buttons at the top left zoom in, zoom out and go back to the centre.
- Expand and collapse: right-click a node. Expand around this node draws another ring with that node’s own sources, derived words, cognates, relations and so on — words already on the graph aren’t drawn again, they just get a connecting line. Collapse around this node folds that ring back in (anything expanded further out from it is hidden too, and comes back as it was when you expand again). The centre word can be collapsed and expanded as well. Expanding a morpheme node shows the entries that use it (those that picked the morpheme directly as a source, and those whose custom sources mention it); expanding a source piece that doesn’t match an entry (a dashed box) shows the words whose sources mention it. Right-clicking an entry node also offers Center on this. Right-clicking empty space offers Back to center and Collapse all.
- Compare : when two or more words come from the same root as the centre word, a Compare button with the number of groups appears at the top right of the canvas. Roots are found by following etymologies all the way up (entries, morphemes, and each piece of a custom source split at morpheme boundaries); prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes, clitics and similar morphemes don’t count as roots, and the centre word itself is also the root of the words derived from it. In the compare view:
- the row at the top lists the root groups (cross-language groups first, then those closer to the centre word and with fewer words), and below it you tick the words to compare, up to 6;
- the table has one column per word: pronunciation; meaning (pieces of meaning shared by all the words are shaded); origin (each step from the root to the word, with its etymology type); parts (other pieces added along the way — prefixes, suffixes, the other half of a compound — highlighted when only some words have them); sound changes (a sound-change rule set with a stage bound to the source language followed by a stage bound to the word’s language is found, the source form is run through it again, and the forms at each stage and the rules applied are listed; a yellow warning appears when the result differs from the lexicon’s spelling); part of speech, registers, tags and dialects (differences are marked). Click the word at the top of a column to centre the graph on it;
- Sound-change differences: when several of the words were derived with the same rule set, each rule is listed on its own row with every word’s form before and after it; by default only the rules that some but not all of the words went through are shown (tick Show all to see everything) — for example, the same root with and without a prefix going through different changes;
- Sound correspondences: when two or more words in different languages come straight from the root (without extra pieces), it lists what each sound of the root became in each word — changed ones only;
∅means lost. - In the example project Aelith, open the relation graph of kaso or teli and click Compare to see how they differ from their cognates in the sister language Merun (hasu, tel) in sound changes, correspondences and meaning.
2. The list {#2-the-list}
- Search headwords, definitions, inflected forms and pronunciations; or search a single field:
word=(headword),gloss=(definition),form=(inflected form),stem=(stem),ipa=(pronunciation),pos=(part of speech),tag=(tag),register=(register),etym=(etymology),note=(notes),script=(script),feature=(a grammatical dimension value — a dimension’s name works as a field too, e.g.gender=fem),dialect=(dialect), or/regex/— see Common conventions. Header sorting and funnel filters are also described in Common conventions; the filterable columns here are initial letter, part of speech, tags, each dimension and dialects, plus language for All languages. To sort by last modification, tick Updated under Columns first and then click its column name. - Columns chooses which columns are shown: part of speech, each gloss language, tags, etymology, pronunciation, each dimension, dialects (when a language defines dialects), each stem slot, each inflected form, each script, and the update time. The choice is saved in the project settings. If columns from different sources end up with the same name, a notice above the list suggests renaming them at their source.
- Column widths fill the table area, so there is no empty space on the right: columns you haven’t resized get a default width by kind (definitions wider, part of speech and dimensions narrower); adding a column first shares out the existing columns’ widths proportionally, never below a minimum, and only scrolls horizontally when they really don’t fit. The right edge of each column can be dragged to resize — the neighbouring column on the right gives or takes the difference. Widths are stored in your local preferences, and Reset column widths is at the bottom of the column menu.
- For entries with several senses, the definition column shows “1、… 2、…”.
- The default order is alphabetical (the current language’s custom alphabet, or Unicode order without one); the button at the far left of the header switches to a custom order, which is stored in the project.
- Duplicate headwords get the whole row shaded pale yellow with a warning icon. To keep only the icon, turn off Settings → Highlight duplicate entries. The inspector also offers Merge duplicates: identical entries in the same language are merged into one, with their senses joined in order. If their parts of speech differ, each sense keeps its original part of speech and the merged entry gets the compound part of speech made of them (such as
n./adj.). Merging can be undone. - Entries without a definition are flagged in red: a pale red row and a red circle next to the headword.
- A status bar at the bottom right of the list counts entries without a definition (red) and duplicate headwords (yellow); hover a badge to list the entries, and click one to jump to it (search and filters are cleared, the row is scrolled into view and flashes). With nothing to report it says No issues.
- Favourites: each row has a star at its far left. It stays invisible until you hover the row, and one click marks the entry as a favourite (the star fills in yellow and stays visible). The star button at the top right of the page is Favourites only — one click narrows the list to your favourites, another restores it. Favourites are stored in the project, and the same star sits next to Word in Edit mode.
- Marks: tick Mark next to Word in Edit mode and the entry gets a symbol in front of it in the list and on its card (
*by default) — a way to flag a handful of words as important. The symbol is set in Settings → Current project → Basics → Mark symbol, and changing it changes every marked word at once. Ctrl-click to select entries one by one,Shift-click to select a range. With several selected, a bar appears above the list: Tags, Delete, Clear selection.- Batch tags: Tags opens a small panel. Type a tag in the box at the top and press Enter (or click Add) to add it to every selected entry. Below, every tag the selection already uses is listed with how many entries carry it (
3/5), followed by three buttons: add it to the rest, rename it (only on the selected entries), and remove it from them. - Double-click a row to select it and open the inspector directly in Edit mode.
3. Entry fields (Edit mode)
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Word | Entered in the primary orthography (formerly called “headword”) |
| Part of speech | Chosen from Parts of speech & dimensions |
| Historical stage | Only when the language has historical stages: the stage this word belongs to, (latest stage) by default. The history row is worked out from it |
| Dimension values | The word’s inherent grammatical features (noun class, gender, etc.) |
| Dialects | Dialect labels defined on the Languages page |
| Senses | Any number, each with definitions (only the current interface language by default; to write others, add them under Settings → Current project → Languages & fonts → Languages to write definitions in), registers, dialects and examples. A sense can have several registers (press Enter to add); common ones such as everyday / formal / colloquial / literary / religious / divine are offered, or type your own. Next to a sense’s number you can pick a part of speech for that sense alone (default: same as the entry; for compound parts of speech, its components are listed first) |
| Etymology | A chain read as “source > stage… > the word itself”; see below |
| Stems | If the part of speech defines stem slots, one input per slot is listed (the grey placeholder is the slot’s description; empty means the headword is used). You can also give a single word custom stems (name → form): after typing the name, Tab jumps straight to the form box, and renaming to an existing name warns about the duplicate and keeps the old name. Paradigm pipelines refer to these stems |
| Inflected forms | Derived by paradigms or typed by hand; see below |
| Pronunciation | One Orthography-based IPA row per orthography (written Orthography-based IPA (orthography name) when there are several): derived from the spelling by that orthography’s to-IPA rules. Tick ! to mark it irregular — typed by hand, so re-transcription won’t overwrite it |
| Affects stress | Off by default. When ticked, Pass part of speech and Pass special stress appear: with the part of speech passed, stress-rule entries written <part of speech> choose by this word’s part of speech; with special stress passed, pick the syllable the stress falls on (Syllable no. / From the end, no. / Unstressed), and rules containing @ use it (see stress rules). The pronunciation is re-derived right away |
| Script form | One per script; empty means generated from the mapping rules |
| Images | Any number of images with captions. The standard size is set in Settings → Entry image size (default 320×240): images of that size are kept as they are, images with the same aspect ratio are scaled, and anything else opens a crop dialog (drag the selection, zoom with the wheel or slider). PNG / GIF are stored losslessly, JPEG / WebP are re-encoded at high quality in their own format. In View mode the first image appears to the right of the headword and the rest as thumbnails |
| Relations | A kind (synonym / antonym / see also / root / compound / derivation / sound change / borrowing / custom…) + a target word. Picking an entry as an etymology source adds a relation of the same name automatically. Choosing Custom in the kind drop-down opens a box next to it, and what you type counts only when you press Enter or leave the box (it no longer disappears after the first letter) |
| Tags, Notes | Tags can be dragged onto another tag to change their order |
Circumfixes among morpheme sources are written “first half…second half” (e.g. e…ce) in chains, entry cards, the Source column and the relation graph.
Several spellings in one field: when a word, a stem or an inflected form is written as several spellings separated by a slash or a comma (fóros/fauros), each spelling is indexed on its own — whichever one a corpus sentence or example uses is recognised as this word, and a corpus word written that way (Degnes/Degnant) is recognised too.
Discontinuous words: a word split into several parts by … (or ...) — ma…gò — is one that is written with other words in between in a sentence. The corpus recognises ma, a word or two, then gò as this entry, giving every part the same entry and the same gloss, and the script line writes each part with only its own half (see Corpus · Automatic analysis).
4. Etymology chains
Etymology is no longer a single “proto-form” box but a chain:
[source] > [stage A] > … > the word itself
- First pick the type: root, compound, derivation, sound change, borrowing, inherited, unknown, or type your own.
- The type decides where sources are picked from: a root is looked up among morphemes (shown with a leading
*), a compound takes A + B from the lexicon, and a borrowing uses a custom source (language + form + meaning). - To record historical intermediate forms, add stages — as many as you like, in chronological order.
- Picking an entry as a source puts the word into the relation graph automatically; morphemes have the same etymology editor, so morphemes and entries form one connected graph.
5. Inflected forms and paradigms
When a part of speech is bound to a paradigm, Edit mode shows a slot panel: one cell per slot (such as “plural.accusative”). Click Derive from paradigm to let the generator fill it in, or type a form by hand. Hand-typed cells are marked as overridden, and later bulk derivation won’t touch them.
Cells you edited by hand can be re-derived at any time: each of them has a ↺ (Restore derived value) next to it — at the top-right corner of the cell in the table and tree views — which derives that one slot from the paradigm again. Next to Derive from paradigm there is also Re-derive all, which derives every slot again, the hand-edited ones included.
Above the panel you can also name a specific paradigm for this word (instead of following its part of speech) and choose a variant; switching recomputes the derived forms and leaves hand-typed ones alone. When a part of speech is bound to several paradigms (for example a verb’s first and second conjugation, see Paradigms · Structure), the drop-down lists “paradigms of this part of speech” as a separate group, and its first item, “by part of speech”, says which one is the default. Reconciliation report next to the Paradigms page title compares derived results with hand-typed values.
When a word also inflects by another paradigm (for example it is both a noun and a verb — one declension, one conjugation), click Add a paradigm next to the inflected forms, then pick the paradigm and variant in the new row under the paradigm drop-down (the × removes it). You can also add another variant of the same paradigm (one written set, one colloquial). The slot panel is grouped per set, headed by the paradigm’s name plus the variant’s name when one is chosen; slots whose names clash with an earlier set get that set’s name in front (Name·slot), so the sets of forms are stored separately. Derive derives the slots of every set.
Every derived cell has a Create entry button next to it (Create a new entry from this form): a new-entry form opens with this form as the headword and the etymology (derived ← this word, with the paradigm and slot in the note) and relation (derivation → this word) already filled in; part of speech, paradigm, definitions in each gloss language and tags can be filled in there before clicking Create, and the form warns if the language already has that headword. Only form, etymology and relation creates the entry without anything else — such an entry has no definition, so the lexicon flags it in red. After creating, Open in lexicon on the toast jumps to it. Results on the Paradigms page’s test bench can be turned into entries the same way.
Inflected forms have three views, chosen at the right of the heading (always visible in Edit mode; in Display mode it appears when you hover over the block — both modes share one choice):
- List: one slot per line, the default.
- Table: the first dimension as rows and the second as columns, with one table per value of the third dimension onwards (each headed by that value, such as “Person 1st person”, or its abbreviation when it has one). In Edit mode the cells are input boxes, so you can fill the table in directly.
- Tree: branching dimension by dimension, with the forms as leaves; branches can be collapsed.
The view you pick is also used by hover cards and the entry cards in the start-page gallery (they only show it, they don’t offer the switch).
Where a dimension value has a gloss abbreviation (set under Parts of speech & dimensions), the slot names, row and column headers and branch points in all three views use it (SG.NOM, PL.ACC); hover one to see the full name. The inflected-form list in Edit mode does the same. Values without an abbreviation keep their names.
Slots whose generator is Pipeline + affects pronunciation in the paradigm (see Paradigms · Affects pronunciation) store a pronunciation on the form when derived, and the entry card shows it in smaller type after the form in all three views (list, table, tree).
The triangle next to the heading collapses the whole block (Display and Edit mode remember it separately); collapsed, it says how many slots there are and how many are filled, and clicking again expands it.
Slot labels are the value names joined with . (such as plural.accusative); in a CSV import, columns with the same name go straight into inflected forms (showing abbreviations on screen does not change this).
6. Example sentences
Below an entry, the example sentences that use the word are listed — from the corpus, the phrasebook and docs. Corpus sentences count by the entry recorded in their analysis, and words that aren’t analysed are compared by headword and inflected forms as whole words; stems are not used for matching (a stem slot often holds only a root or a stem vowel that never stands alone), headwords written with a hyphen (al-) only match through their inflected forms, and a word already confirmed as another entry doesn’t count even if it is spelled the same. 3 are shown by default (change it in Settings → Examples shown below entries). See all examples opens a page with every occurrence, loading more as you scroll, so it stays fast even for common words.
The word is highlighted where it occurs: a whole-word match highlights the whole word; when the match is an inflected form, or only one piece of a compound or affixed word, just that piece is highlighted. When the position can’t be pinned down (the text was edited by hand, the analysis is out of date), the sentence still counts as an example, it just isn’t highlighted.
With Examples under an entry also show the script line and where they come from ticked in Settings → Application → Display, each example gains a line above it with the language’s scripts (written as on the Corpus page) and its source after it; it is off by default.
When an entry has several senses and a corpus word matches it as a whole, the candidate list offers one candidate per sense (each with that sense’s gloss), so you can pick which sense it is.
7. Importing
- Import preview: while importing, the inspector shows an import preview — what the first few entries will look like with the current settings (word, part of speech, sense parts of speech and registers, tags, pronunciation, etymology and so on). Change the column mapping, options or marker handling and the preview updates immediately, with changed parts highlighted and fading. Words that already exist in the project are marked as such.
- CSV: in the wizard, choose a file or paste a table (TSV) directly, then assign a meaning to each column. The drop-down only lists fields that can be filled for the chosen Import as: for entries — word, language, part of speech, definition (per language), register, sense tag, tags, dialect, grammatical feature, pronunciation (per orthography), script form (per script), etymology type, etymology source (source language), etymology stage (with a description), etymology notes, relation (kind), stem, inflected form, paradigm, paradigm variant, notes (with a prefix), inspector module (title) and affects stress; for morphemes — form, language, type, second form, gloss, meaning, allomorphs, grammatical feature, tags, the etymology fields, notes and affects stress. Column mappings can be saved as presets. The target can be entries or morphemes. Format help at the top right of the wizard opens the CSV format section below.
- With Split definitions into senses on semicolons ticked (the default),
A;B;Cbecomes three senses, shown in the list as “1、A 2、B 3、C”; existing1、numbering in the source is removed. - Codes at the start of definitions (when importing entries): this table only appears when digits written right before the text of a definition are detected (“1leave;2go to” — numbering like “1、” and long numbers like “2020” don’t count). Choose for each: Set as sense tag (type the tag on the right, e.g.
1→ monovalent; typing one sets it as a tag automatically), Only remove the code, or Keep as is (default). Codes can be written together (01=0+1). The choices are saved with the column-mapping preset, and older presets written as “code=tag” are converted automatically. - Bracket markers (when importing entries): when markers such as
【专】,【神】,〔古〕or[arch.]appear in words, definitions or notes, the options list each kind of marker with its count, the columns it appears in and an example, and you choose how to handle each: Set as register (the default; type the register name on the right, e.g. “古” → “archaic”, or pick a common register), Set as sense tag, Only remove the marker, or Keep as is.- The first bracket right after a sense number (
1、,2.,3)) counts as a marker too, parentheses included: “1、(古)宅第;2、(方)玉米” is treated like “【古】宅第;【方】玉米”, and the numbering is removed as usual. - Whether parentheses count as markers is controlled by the option Parentheses can be register markers too (ticked by default): unticked, parentheses in this rule and the next always stay in the definition as written and don’t go into the marker table; only brackets like
【】,〔〕and[]count. The option is saved with the column-mapping preset. - The first parenthesis right after a part-of-speech abbreviation (
n.,adj.) counts too, and it can contain several words:n. (archaic) she-cat,adj. (slang, vulgar) …; set as a register, comma-separated items become several registers. Parentheses that read like a phrase ((placed before the noun),(+ abs.)) are kept as text by default — change them in the table if you want a register or tag. Parentheses at the start of the following senses governed by the same abbreviation (n. (a) …; (b) …) count too. - A marker in a definition covers the text up to the next marker or semicolon, and the parts before and after become separate senses: “房屋;【古】宅第” is two senses, the second with the register “archaic”; “经常的【引】流动的” is also split into two.
- A passage in the notes that starts with a marker (
【人】某某) becomes a new sense, and the rest stays as notes; a marker before the word applies to every sense of the entry. - Brackets touching letters (
colo[u]r), brackets not followed by text (a phonetic transcription at the end of a line), purely numeric footnotes, and parentheses with neither a sense number nor a part-of-speech abbreviation in front don’t count as markers. The choices are saved with the column-mapping preset.
- The first bracket right after a sense number (
- Part-of-speech labels (when importing entries): forms like
n.,v.,adj.orv因.at the start of a definition — “Latin letters + a few characters + a dot” (also after numbering or bracket markers;n./v.counts as two) — are listed in a Part-of-speech labels table, and again you choose for each: Set as part of speech (type the name on the right; common abbreviations are pre-matched, such asn.noun,v.verb,adj.adjective), Set as sense tag, Only remove the label, or Keep as is. Typing the name or abbreviation of an existing part of speech uses it (marked “existing”); a slash-joined name likenoun/verbis a compound part of speech; names not in the project are marked “new” and created on import. Unrecognised long strings (house.,e.g.) are kept as text by default.- A part-of-speech label covers the senses up to the next label in the same cell: in “n.石头;卵石;v.跑”, the first two senses are nouns and the third is a verb.
- A label may be followed directly by bracket markers (
n.[中古][文学]金石) without producing a sense that contains onlyn.. - If all senses of an entry have the same part of speech, that becomes the entry’s part of speech; if they belong to several, the entry gets the compound part of speech made of them and each sense keeps its own. When the table has a part-of-speech column, the entry’s part of speech comes from that column, and
n.orn./v.written there are also recognised through this table. The choices are saved with the column-mapping preset.
- Links to existing things in the project: when an etymology source has a source language that exists in the project, headwords or morphemes of the same form are linked directly (
kal ‘stone’ + ribecomes two sources; the quoted text is the meaning), and anything not found is recorded as an external source. Relations find their targets by headword (the same language first; other rows of the same import count too), and targets not found are listed in the report. Dialects are matched by name or abbreviation and created if missing; paradigms and paradigm variants are matched by name (the base variant’s name is recognised too). - Inspector modules: a column whose name matches an inspector module’s title or one of its “column names also recognised on import” is matched automatically; you can also pick Inspector module manually and type a title, and a module that doesn’t exist yet is created on import (and listed in the report). The ? next to the Column mapping title explains this.
- With Split definitions into senses on semicolons ticked (the default),
- Lexicanter: after choosing a
.lexcfile, the main area first lists how many languages, entries, phrases, rule sets and docs will be created, and lets you choose which gloss language the sense text goes into; the inspector shows the import preview. Nothing is merged into the project until you click Import. The lexicon, senses, dialects, pronunciation rules, alphabet, etymologies, phrasebook and docs all come in at once.
8. Exporting
The export menu:
- Entries CSV / Morphemes CSV: tables with every field.
- Export dictionary / template… opens a panel:
- HTML: a two-column print layout grouped by initial letter, with headword, script, pronunciation, part of speech, senses, stems and inflected forms, etymology and notes (each optional; the sense languages are selectable). When a sense’s part of speech differs from the entry’s, it is written before the definition.
- Markdown: suitable for a wiki.
- PDF: the desktop app writes the file directly; the web version goes through the print dialog.
- Per-entry template: `
, with blocks` (`` is the sense’s own part of speech, empty when it equals the entry’s) and ` `. A live preview of the first few entries appears on the right; templates can be saved in the project, exported as text or copied.
CSV format
Column names on import aren’t fixed — you assign each column in the wizard — but headers with the names below are recognised automatically. Exported CSV files use exactly these names, so they can be edited and imported back. Files are UTF-8 (exports include a BOM so Excel shows them correctly); comma, semicolon, tab and pipe separators are detected automatically, and cells containing commas or line breaks are wrapped in double quotes.
Entries
| Header (any of these) | Field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
lemma, word, 词头, 单词, 字典形 |
Word | Required; rows with an empty word are skipped by default |
pos, 词类, 词性 |
Part of speech | Name or abbreviation; abbreviations like n. or n./v. are recognised through the wizard’s Part-of-speech labels table, and slash-joined names like noun/verb are compound parts of speech; parts of speech not in the project are created |
definition_zh, 释义, 中文; definition_en, english |
Definition (in that language) | For other languages write a language code such as definition_ja. Semicolons (; ;) separate senses; markers such as 【古语】 before a sense can be set as registers, and abbreviations like n. give that sense’s part of speech |
tags, 标签 |
Tags | Separated by commas or 、 |
proto, 原始形, source |
Etymology source | The original form |
notes, 备注 |
Notes | |
ipa, 发音 |
Pronunciation | Written to the primary orthography and marked as hand-entered |
stress, 对重音影响, 重音 |
Affects stress | pos passes the part of speech; special:-2 (or just a number; 倒数第2 and 第1 work too) passes special stress, with 0 or unstressed meaning unstressed; separate items with commas, e.g. pos, special:-1. The column is exported only when some entry has it ticked |
语言, 方言, 词源类别, 中间态, 同义词, 反义词, 关系, 构形, 文字 (in English: language, dialects, etymology type, stages, synonyms, antonyms, relations, paradigm, script) |
The corresponding field | Several dialects or relation targets are separated by commas or 、; relations are matched by headword; the etymology type recognises inherited, borrowing and abbreviations like bor. and inh., and unrecognised values are kept as custom types |
| An inspector module’s title or one of its “column names also recognised on import” | Inspector module | For list modules, separate items with 、; if the module doesn’t exist yet, pick Inspector module manually and type the title — it is created on import |
| Other columns | Stems, inflected forms, grammatical features, registers, sense tags, paradigm variants… | Choose the field in the wizard and fill in the stem name, slot name or dimension name; separate several registers in a register column with commas or 、 |
lemma,pos,definition_zh,tags,proto,notes
kala,名词,【古语】宅第;房屋,基础,*kal-a,
tavi,动词,看见,,,
seru,名词/动词,n. 光;v. 照亮,,,
On export, each sense’s registers are written before the sense as 【register】, one after another for several (【古语】【文学】宅第; avoid spaces in register names); when importing again, choose Set as register under Markers in words, definitions and notes to bring them back. When a sense’s part of speech differs from the entry’s, it is written first as n. (n. 【古语】宅第), and the entry’s part-of-speech column is written as a compound such as noun/verb; set them as parts of speech in the Part-of-speech labels table when importing again and everything comes back. Each inspector module gets its own column named after its title and is matched automatically on re-import. Sense tags, stems, inflected forms, images and relations between words are not in this CSV; to move everything, use the project file or Export as folder.
Morphemes
| Header (any of these) | Field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
form, 词根, lemma |
Form | Required; prefixes and suffixes carry hyphens (sa-, -lar) |
type, 类型 |
Type | root prefix suffix infix circumfix clitic pattern particle; the Chinese names 词根, 前缀, 后缀 and so on are recognised too; unrecognised values become tags |
gloss, 缩写 |
Gloss | |
meaning_zh, 释义 |
Meaning (in that language) | Other languages likewise use a language code |
allomorphs, 异体形 |
Allomorphs | Separate several with semicolons, and form from environment with a slash: lar / _V;ler / Front_ |
form2, 第二形式 |
Second form | The second half of a circumfix, an infix’s position, etc. |
tags, 标签 |
Tags | |
notes, 备注 |
Notes | |
stress, 对重音影响 |
Affects stress | As for entries, plus as:noun (算作:名词) for the part of speech it counts as |
When importing, switch Import as to Morphemes in the wizard. Allomorphs are not in the exported CSV; add them afterwards in the Morphemes page’s inspector. For the corpus and phrasebook table formats, see Corpus and Phrasebook.
9. Connections
| Source | Effect |
|---|---|
| Phonology → orthography rules | Pronunciation is generated automatically |
| Script → mapping rules | The Script column and the script line on entry cards |
| Paradigms | Slot panel, inflected forms, the inflection table on entry cards |
| Morphemes | Etymology sources |
| Corpus | Hovering a word in a sentence shows this page’s entry card; clicking jumps back here, and the list scrolls to the word and highlights it briefly |
| Docs | [[headword]] links jump here |
| Command palette | Ctrl+K finds a headword or definition directly |
10. Tips
- Deleting an entry can be undone; relations and etymologies that referred to it show
?instead of raising errors. - To review proto-language and daughter-language correspondences in bulk in a multi-language project, use All languages and tick Etymology under Columns.
- To put the lexicon on your own website, prefer the per-entry template — the output format is entirely up to you.
荏苒之境
kikomas
Cathamos