Search the Old Norse Dictionary (original) (raw)
Search is not case sensitive.
Hyphens are removed from words in the search index (e.g., search for afgamall not af-gamall).
Search uses unicode. Thus, in addition to accented vowels, ð, and þ, you can also use Greek characters to find quotes and etymology notes that contain Greek words. For example, searching for λεγ in the info tags will find words marked as hapax legomenon (ἅπ. λεγ.)
Be careful, unlike fancy search engines, this search engine is very literal. Multi-word text will only match exact phrases in the quotes (i.e., any variation in spelling or any abbreviation of the headword in the dictionary version of the quote may cause searching for the exact quote to fail).
Some words contain a list of inflected forms that will be searched by default. However, these may not capture some of spelling variations that exist. Some of these inflection lists are auto-generated, so there may be errors leading to false hits or correct forms that are missing. Please report any errors so we can continue to improve the flexibility of the search results.
Note that the options to modify the spelling of the search term are only applied when searching the headwords. While this may generate some false hits, it should capture the most common variations. For example, the dictionary doesn’t use ǫ, but some texts do; some texts use œ, but most word forms in this dictionary use æ instead of œ; vowel shifts due to u-umlaut and i-umlaut are common; etc. – automatically applying these spelling variations makes it easier to simply look up the word as it’s found in the text.
Search uses PHP (PCRE) style regular expressions. This allows you to specify useful things like
- alternate characters: [eø]ðli matches both eðli and øðli;
- alternate spellings: mik(il|la) matches mikil and mikla (as well as forms like mikill and mikils; see the section on word boundaries, below);
- exclude characters: mikil[^l] matches mikil and mikils but not mikill;
- wildcard characters:
- . = any single character: m.n matches heiman, mun, etc., but also situations like em nú and um nótt because . also matches whitespace or punctuation;
- \w = any letter (i.e., a word character): so m\wn would avoid matching situations like um nótt, etc.;
- \W = not a letter (i.e., not a word character): so m\Wn would only match situations like um nótt, etc.;
- word boundaries:
- \b = word boundary;
- \B = not a word boundary;
- so, \baf\b only matches isolated af, whereas \Baf\b only matches final af, like altaf, and \Baf\B only matches internal af, like hafði, etc.;
- quantifiers:
- ? = 0 or 1 of the preceding character: so róu?m matches both róum and róm;
- * = 0 or more of the preceding character: so brún* matches brú, brún, and brúnn;
- = 1 or more of the preceding character: so brún+ doesn’t match brú, but still matches brún and brúnn;
- { } = specific number or range of the preceding character: so hin{2} matches hinn, while hin{1,2} matches both hin and hinn;
- escaping special characters:
- If you need the literal . or ? characters, you can escape their special behavior with \. and \?
- For example, acc. matches acc. as well as according, account, etc. But, acc\. only matches acc.
- combinations of these:
- both \bb(rau|[ou]r)t\b and \bb(rau|or|ur)t\b will match braut, bort, and burt;
- whereas, \bb(rau|[ou]r)t\B and \bb(rau|or|ur)t\B will only match inflected versions and compound words like burtu, brautir, brautferð, etc.;
- \bsverð alone matches any word beginning with sverð (sverð, sverði, sverðit, sverðinu, sverðs-hjöltum, etc.), while \bsverð\w{2}\b matches only forms of sverð with 2 character endings (sverðit, sverðum), and \bsverð\w{2,3}\b will match forms of sverð with 2 or 3 character endings (sverðit, sverðum, sverðinu, etc.)
- and much more (search for regex tutorials).
You can use this search page as a simple dictionary for e-readers and other apps that allow custom dictionaries. You just set a variable called search to the desired word or phrase.
- For example, in moon+ reader, the custom dictionary puts the highlighted text inside %s, so that is set as the value of search:
- The \b modifier is optional, but this cuts down on false results where the search term occurs as part of some larger word. The anchor is also optional, but moves the page down to the results as if the button had been pressed.
- To specify specifically which fields you want to search, set the variable flags to a string containing one or more of the following characters:
- m to search the main dictionary,
- i to search the introduction/grammar sections,
- h to search headwords,
- q to search quotations,
- d to search definitions,
- t to search translations of quotes,
- g to search grammar related information and discussion,
- e to search etymology notes and discussion,
- d to search historical/cultural/misc discussions,
- c to search citations,
- F to search the list of inflected forms (when it exists),
- A to apply alternate characters to the search term (œ/æ, ø/e, and u-umlaut) when searching headwords,
- I to apply i-umlaut variations to the search term (a/e; á/æ; o/ø,e; ó/œ,æ; ö/ø; u/y; ú/ý; jó/ý; jú/ý; au/ei) when searching headwords (Note: enabling i-umlaut changes automatically enables alternates/u-umlaut changes),
- r to display matches in ranked order,
- a to display matches in alphabetical order,
- For example, in moon+ reader, if you wanted to perform reverse searches, i.e. search for English words in the definitions and the translations, in the main dictionary, you would use
- The default settings (if no flags are set) are to search the headwords and list of inflected forms in the main dictionary with the alternates/u-umlaut and i-umlaut spelling changes enabled and displaying the matches in ranked order (i.e., the equivalent of &flags=hFmAIr).