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TibThob

a free tool for searching the Rangjung Yeshe Tibetan-English Dictionary.


Version 1.1
 

 

The Rangjung Yeshe Tibetan-English Dictionary of Buddhist Culture...

...is an ongoing project involved in compiling Buddhist terminology and translation terms to bridge the Tibetan and English languages. Begun in 1979, it has slowly grown to a database of more than 66,000 entries. Comparatively, the Tibetan-English Dictionary of Sarat Chandra Das has approximately 27,000 entries. 
[This is an excerpt from the Rangjung Yeshe Dictionary's page, that you can consult for more details.]


 

TibThob is a simple yet powerful tool for searching words in the Rangjung Yeshe Dictionary.

It is freely available on Windows and Linux (MacOS X expected soon), in binary and source form. (If you want sources, contact me personally.)

TibThob has some original features:
 

  • Searches in Phonetics: only hearing a tibetan word or expression or reading it written in (often fancy) phonetics makes difficult or tedious to find it in a dictionary. There are potentially complex and numerous combinations of prefix, superscribed, subjoined, suffix, post-suffix letters that can produce the same sound. 
    TiibThob will help you to save a lot of time by allowing  to type a word in "natural phonetics", like in the following example:
     
    TibThob screen shot
     
  • Searches Approximate Syllables: with TibThob it is possible to search Wylie Tibetan syllables with some degree of approximation. This can be useful if the spelling you have is not totally reliable (for example you don't find the word in the dictionary), or if you want to check for variant spellings.
    This mode works by ignoring the prefix, superscribed and second suffix letters of tibetan syllables.
     
  • Query refinements: since the RY dictionary has many entries, a query can yield hundreds of hits. To avoid reading everything, you can reduce the number of matches by requiring or excluding words or fragments from your query. You can also specify in which part of dictionary entries these words should or should not appear. For example, it is possible to require all entries with the fragment byang chub, but not byang chub sems and additionally require the word "practice" to appear in the definition.   

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