An Icelandic-English Dictionary

Help Improve the Dictionary

If you find typos, formatting errors, OCR errors, and/or internal references that are missing a link (or existing links that point to the wrong location), please

The quality of the search function depends on the accuracy of the semantic tags (used to generate the search database). If you want to help proof-read these semantic tags you can view this color-coded version of the text.

Background

This version of An Icelandic-English Dictionary builds on the work of the Germanic Lexicon Project. I've made regular use of the original online version since 2004 and I always found it a valuable and convenient resource. However, the project stopped incorporating corrections prior to 2008 and, over the years, I found myself wanting to clean up those remaining errors, convert the text encoding entirely to Unicode, and make it easier to navigate the dictionary (especially when using the scanned images). I hope that my efforts in improving the online dictionary will be found useful by students and hobbyists alike.

After several years of playing around with scripts, I finally attacked the project as a whole in early 2019 and have worked on it, as time permitted, since then. Specifically, I've completed the following:

• Converted the text to UTF-8 and embedded a font (Junicode, see below) so all characters are displayed correctly. The main text contained quite a few placeholders (e.g., &aolig; &avlig; &aalig; etc.) as well as rune, uncertain, unknown, illegible, and image tags that I've replaced with the correct Unicode characters or images as needed.
• Converted the markup to HTML5.
• Improved the formatting of the dictionary entries to use layers of hanging indents so it's easier to identify head-words and follow the logic of the longer entries.
• Proof-read/corrected the entire introductory section. This had not been open to the crowd-sourced proof-reading in the original project and was not included in Thomas Stridman's OCR improvements. This also included building tables for the grammar portion.
• Proof-read the Errata and Addenda that Thomas Stridman incorporated into the main text; adding all the missing material and marking all changes to the text with strike-through and footnotes.
• Moved the historical/etymological discussion of each letter into the introductory material (following the introduction to the alphabet) and moved the lists of rivers and Gaelic words from the appendix into the introduction (following the lists of verbs and irregular forms).
• Duplicated the list of negatives under ú- to a list of negatives under ó-. This was a common source of frustration for students as modern editions tend to use ó- for the negative prefix.
• Added links to all internal references within the dictionary (both to other main entries and to grammar sections).
• Search functionality:
• Added anchors to every head-word and every line in sub-entries.
• Added semantically appropriate tags for different types of information in each entry. The initial tagging was automated, followed by targeted hand-corrections.
• Created scripts to auto-generate search indices from the tagged files.
• Created the search interface to filter searching by type of information (headword vs. definition vs. quote vs. translation, etc.)
• Created a search algorithm that allows regular expressions and unicode characters as well as a display of results with links to the original entries.
• Tagged the introduction/grammar sections so they could be included in searches.
• Improvements for mobile devices:
• Modified the layout/design so it's easier to read through page scans and simpler to switch between page scans and the text version.
• Added navigation menus to improve usability, especially for mobile devices.
• Split all multi-column images into a single column for easier reading and more convenient size on mobile devices.
• Note: in some places, the quality of the .PNG images from the original project can be poor; so, you may need to refer to the higher resolution .TIFF images in the original project at times.
• Added the ability to request a search from the URL itself. This is useful for e-readers that allow custom dictionaries. See notes under the instruction section of the search page.
• In progress:
• Verify that links to homographs and multi-section entries are pointing to the correct location.
• Improve the search results by cleaning up the automated tagging. The final visual inspection and correction of tags are in progress; completed pages are marked with strikethrough:
  A, Á, B, D, E/É, F, G, H, I, Í, J, K, L, M, N, O, Ó, P, R, S, T, U, Ú, V, Y, Ý, Þ, Æ/Œ, Ö/Ø

I have included the many OCR corrections from Thomas Stridman's version of this dictionary. His improvements to the original project were particularly valuable for the Greek words and phrases (none of which were interpreted correctly by the original OCR process). He also moved most of the Errata and Addenda into the main text.

I have embedded the Junicode font for the text. This typeface is based on George Hickes Linguarum vett. septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archaeologicus (Oxford, Sheldonian Theatre, 1703–1705). It's specifically designed for medievalists (i.e., it implements the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative, version 4.0) and contains several features useful for this project like runic characters, proper Nordic shapes for þ and ð, and a number of unusual characters found in manuscripts that are sometimes used in the dictionary (e.g.,  and ).

—Scott Burt
Contact:
Last update: 2020-09-01

Other Online Dictionaries

• The Germanic Lexicon Project: An Icelandic-English Dictionary, Cleasby and Vigfusson
  • The original project to scan and OCR a number of dictionaries and resources related to Germanic languages.
  • Note: high-resolution .TIFF images are available for closer inspection of the original scan. A simple search function is also available; however, it doesn't accept accented vowels or characters like ð or þ, nor does it accept regular expressions, and it searches several Old English texts in addition to Cleasby-Vigfusson with no way of filtering the results.
• Norrœn Dýrð: An Icelandic-English Dictionary, Cleasby and Vigfusson
  • Thomas Stridman's updated version of the Germanic Lexicon Project version.
  • Text only. Many OCR errors have been fixed (especially the Greek text). Most of the errata and addenda have been folded into the main text.
• Norrœn Dýrð: A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic, Zoëga
  • Thomas Stridman OCR'd the images from the Germanic Lexicon Project and converted the text into a very nice HTML version of this dictionary.
  • Note: Zoëga's dictionary is based on Cleasby-Vigfusson, but omits the etymology and references/examples as well as the purely poetical and legal vocabulary. Also note that Zoëga distinguishes vowels etymologically (œ vs æ, ø vs ö), but this doesn't always match the vowels used in a given edition of a text (or even the vowels used in the original manuscript).
• The Germanic Lexicon Project: A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic, Zoëga
  • Just the page scans, no OCR'd text.
• Septentrionalia: Lexicon Poeticum, Egilsson
  • Page scans and OCR'd text.
  • Note: this lexicon contains the poetical vocabulary translated into Danish. Cleasby and Vigufsson made use of this dictionary when compiling theirs.
• Dictionary of Old Norse Prose
  • This impressive resource is part of The Arnamagnæan Collection in the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen.
  • Definitions are drawn from several sources:
  • An Icelandic-English Dictionary, Cleasby and Vigfusson (adapted from the Germanic Lexicon Project version above).
  • A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic, Zoëga (adapted from Thomas Stridman's version above).
  • Ordbog over det gamle norske Sprog, J. Fritzner (adapted from an XML file used for the search website).
  • Also allows searching a large repository of digital transcriptions of manuscripts.

Notes:

• It's still possible to order a physical copy of Cleasby-Vigfusson from the Oxford University Press via their Print-On-Demand service. However, the quality of the binding is rather disappointing.
• Several re-prints of Zoëga's dictionary have appeared over the past decade or two; I like the MART series reprint from the University of Toronto Press.

Information from the Original Project

Cleasby/Vigfusson is the most comprehensive and authoritative dictionary on Old Icelandic.

The copyright on this dictionary is expired. You are welcome to copy this data, post it on other web sites, create derived works, or use the data in any other way you please. As a courtesy, please credit the Germanic Lexicon Project.

Work on this project started in 2003. It was one of the major ongoing projects, with correction work being performed by volunteers worldwide. The goal was to produce a fully corrected document, marked up in XML.

Sean Crist initiated and was directing the project, and also did the OCR, major software design and programming, and ongoing global corrections.

Scanning and preparation of these page images was made possible by a grant from the American-Scandinavian Foundation.

Germanic Lexicon Project

Home Texts About