3

When I was researching for this question of mine, I wanted to find nouns similar to missile. I used the L&S on Perseus and searched for all words ending in -ile, but missile was not included. The word is listed under the adjective missilis.

I wanted to find substantivized adjectives ending in -ile, but it appears that my preferred search tool will not show them at all. Not all adjectives have established substantivizations, so searching for all adjectives ending in -ilis would have produced too much noise.

Is there an online Latin dictionary that allows to search for words by their ending and that lists missile separately from missilis (or at least shows missile in search results for words ending in -ile)?

1

1 Answer 1

2

A brute force solution, based on the entry list of +12k Latin nouns available in Wiktionary:

  1. Go to this website.

  2. In the "Categories" tab, change "Project" to "wiktionary" and "Categories" to Latin nouns, as shown below.

enter image description here

  1. In the "Output" tab, select CSV (to eliminate restriction on number of elements to return).

  2. Click "Do it!" button. You should now get a CSV file, containing 12831 rows of Latin nouns.

  3. Open the file in your favorite spreadsheet software and run a regular expression (regex) search of \w*ile\b. This should be done through something like "Find and Replace"" or so. After this, you should get a list of 28 nouns, as shown below (using LibreOffice).

enter image description here

Naturally, the usefulness of the method is restricted to the Wiktionary coverage of the Latin corpus (more precisely, to the indexation of existing Latin word pages to the Latin noun categories). The word missile, for instance, albeit part of Wiktionary, is not indexed as a noun, and therefore not included in the results above.

3
  • Wow! This tool is far heavier than what I expected to see... This is a good option to be aware of (+1), but I hope there are easier ways. And ways that see missile.
    – Joonas Ilmavirta
    Dec 3, 2018 at 17:36
  • @JoonasIlmavirta An even more brute force method would be to simply search the index of all Latin words and their declensions available. It seems however that there is no such list in Wiktionary.
    – luchonacho
    Dec 3, 2018 at 17:44
  • If you list them all, it gives a whole lot of false positives. That might not be debilitating, but it would be nice to have access to attested substantivized adjectives with less noise.
    – Joonas Ilmavirta
    Dec 3, 2018 at 17:58

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and code of conduct.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.