Philippine On-Line Dictionary

Welcome to the Philippine on-line dictionary. Many thanks to Tim Harvey for making available his database for use on this site.

Please note that this dictionary cannot translate sentences or phrases. It can only look up single words for you. If you enter a phrase, it will attempt to find all words in the phrase. If you need some phrases, try out our Cebuano Phrase Book.

If you are looking for a more extensive alternative: the excellent Cebuano dictionary by John U. Wolff is available on line at Cornell University: Vol I (A-K) and Vol II (L-Z). This is the best dictionary available for Cebuano. However, be sure to read the introduction before using it. This introduction explains the principles used to create this dictionary, and is very helpful in putting to good use the information found inside.

We also have Calderon's English-Spanish-Tagalog Dictionary and Kaufmann's Hiligaynon-English Dictionary available.

This dictionary has been queried 4777515 times

Also have a look at our page of Boholano Proverbs and Boholano Riddles

Please Help Digitizing Wolff's Cebuano Dictionary

Our next target is to add a high-quality Cebuano dictionary. For this we selected one of the best dictionaries ever made for Cebuano: Professor John U. Wolff's Cebuano-English Dictionary, published in 1972. Its publisher, Cornell University, has dedicated this important work to the Public Domain, so we can use it here. Professor Wolff, now an Emeritus Professor, supports our digitization effort. For now we need help from volunteers and students to correct the text derived from page-images using OCR (optical character recognition) software. To help, you can follow the following steps. Go to the site pgdp.net Register yourself as a member (link in top right of welcome page), and sign in. Carefully read the proofreading guidelines. Go to the P1 (Proofreading Round 1) page. (link in top left of activity hub page). Locate the dictionary in the available projects list. (Search for Wolff in your browser) Open the project page for the dictionary. Carefully read the special instructions for this dictionary on the PGDP wiki. Start proofreading, cleaning up the output of the OCR software. The dictionary will go through no less than five rounds of proofreading, so in the end, we will have a digital text with a very high level of accuracy. This text I will use to create a searchable interface similar to that for Kaufmann on this site. If all regular users of this site will help proof just one page a week, we will have the dictionary available for all next year! Contact the webmaster if you have any questions. If I can obtain more dictionaries, I will also add them to this site.

Instructions

You can search for words in English, Cebunao, Hiligaynon, and Tagalog by selecting the desired language in the drop-down box. Type the word you are looking for in the search box and hit enter. You will get results in all languages (if available). The dictionary now contains over 30.000 entries and we are working hard to extend it. If you are not sure about the spelling of the word, you can use a question mark (?) for a single unknown letter, or a star (*) for a sequence of letters. If you cannot find a word at first, try using a star before or after it.

If you are unsure about the spelling of a Philippine word, you can check the 'Phonetic Match' box. This will expand the search to words that are spelled similar to the word you provide, taking into account the phonetic structure of the Philippine languages.

When the results appear, the words in the results are clickable, so that you can quickly do a 'reverse look-up,' and find related words.

Please note that this database is experimental, and still contains a small number of errors. Please notify us if you encounter an error.