What Is LexiQamus?

What could that word be?

Those who work with Ottoman Turkish manuscripts frequently encounter letters that are difficult to decipher. The handwriting may be unclear, or the document may be torn, burnt, folded, or stained with ink. Many different factors can make a word illegible.

LexiQamus was developed to solve this problem.

Conventional dictionaries are helpful when only the final letters of a word are illegible, since the beginning of the word remains intact. However, they are of little use when letters at the beginning or in the middle of a word are missing or unclear.

This is precisely where LexiQamus comes into play. Based on the legible letters and the symbols entered for illegible characters, LexiQamus’s specialized search algorithm provides a list of possible words that match the specified criteria. A word that might take days to identify by searching through extensive dictionaries can thus be found almost instantly.

Additional information associated with each result makes it possible to access its definitions, related entries, and the other dictionary entries in which it appears. In this way, researchers can examine not only the word itself but also its broader lexicographical context.

The foundations of the project were laid by manually transcribing all 160,485 words and phrases found in James W. Redhouse’s A Turkish and English Lexicon into a searchable database.

In short, when you search for a word using LexiQamus, your query is compared against an extensive and continuously expanding lexicographical database.