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There are various useful dictionary tools, like Dickinson's College Latin Core Vocabulary, which gives you the top 1000 Latin words (not sure what corpus they're using, but I assume it's one that's quite substantial).

However, I'm working through specific texts and would find it very useful to be able to plug in a body of text and get a list of unique words, sorted by frequency. Ideally it would be a "Latin aware" and group a single word together, regardless of inflection--but this would be quite complex and I suspect such a tool does not exist.

WordCounter.net will give you the top 100 unique words in the "keyword" panel, but appears to have a hard limit (you can enter a keyword limit of any number, but it only gives you the top 100).

Is there a freely available web tool that you can provide a block of text, and it will give you a list of unique words, with frequency of each word, and that you can sort by frequency (so I can start by reviewing the most frequently used words in the list). Dealing with repeated words (e.g., different inflections of the same word) is something I'll simply have to deal with.

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  • If you're familiar with Python, I believe the cltk library can do a lot of these things
    – brianpck
    Jan 24 at 21:56
  • I've thought about rolling mine own, but it just seemed like something that might exist out there already.
    – Josh
    Jan 24 at 21:56
  • If you're willing to settle for a naïve word counter even just grep -io '[a-z]*' | sort -f | uniq -ci | sort -n works if you're not on Windows. Otherwise e.g. Voyant can do it (but it's not Latin-aware).
    – Cairnarvon
    Jan 24 at 22:23

1 Answer 1

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I've created a tool based which is available online.

It is based on CLTK lemmatizer (In particular BackoffLatinLemmatizer). it is not perfect, but very good. All lemmas are lower case. But as far as the user input is pretty free and supports also macrons in the texts.

It should be noted that all forms were lemmatized in advance using Persues corpus as available by CLTK: forms that are not unattested in this corpus are not going to be lemmatized well (even if CLTK lemmatizer would have worked well on those).

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  • 1
    Are you open to collaboration and others maintaining it?
    – cmw ♦
    Jan 25 at 0:30
  • 1
    Can you add a link to the GitHub repo?
    – Josh
    Jan 25 at 2:00
  • As far as features, I think a great one would be an ignored words list. You could paste in a comma delimited list of words you want to exclude, certain conjunctions in prepositions tend to float to the top of most frequency lists. And maybe even have a checkbox labeled "ignore common conjunctions and prepositions" and when you click it it automatically sticks those in the ignore list.
    – Josh
    Jan 25 at 13:34
  • Can you add a link to the Git repo?
    – Josh
    Feb 19 at 16:22
  • The "generate" button is now disabled. @d_e, did you take this tool offline? I found it quite useful.
    – Josh
    Jun 25 at 15:48

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