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:

- 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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