Why I Built a Lanna Dictionary

Most of my notes are about code. This one is about words. It is about a small tool with one job: make Lanna words easy to look up.

What it is

Moradok Lanna is a site about Lanna heritage. One part of it is a dictionary between Lanna and Thai, with more than 17,000 entries. You can open the dictionary and search in either direction, Lanna to Thai or Thai to Lanna.

What an entry shows

Each entry is a small card of facts:

• how the word is pronounced, written in Thai letters
• the word in Lanna script
• the matching Thai spelling, in brackets
• the meaning, in Thai

Meanings carry a part-of-speech mark, such as noun, verb or adjective. Words with more than one sense have numbered meanings. Some entries add an example of use or a "see also" pointer to a related word. Where an English gloss helps, I keep it short and literal, a plain translation of the Thai.

Around the dictionary

The dictionary page also has a "learn 10 new words" table and text-size controls. The same site has a word of the day, a word-guessing quiz, a word-matching game and a Lanna calendar. Each one is a different way to meet the same words.

How I think about it as a builder

I build software for a living, so the dictionary is also a product with one clear job: find the word, read the meaning. That is the same rule I use for Plaazaa: keep the tool small and make one job easy.

I also wrote about where my habit of careful, lean work comes from in what the DOS era taught me.

Try it

The toy below has four words taken from the public dictionary. Pick one to see its card. English glosses are a short translation of the Thai. It is a small sample. The real thing is on the dictionary page.

More small toys live on the widgets page, and the rest of my stories are in Notes.