Welcome to Dante - A lexical database for English
Dante is a new lexical database for English. It provides a fine-grained and comprehensive record of the behaviour of over 42,000 headwords and 23,000 multiword expressions, and includes over 27,000 idioms and phrases.
Dante is the product of a three-year lexicographic project, in which the core vocabulary of English was analysed from scratch, using a custom-built corpus of 1.7 billion words. It is a unique resource, providing a systematic description of the meanings, grammatical and collocational behaviour, and text-type characteristics of English words. Linguistic facts, drawn from the corpus, are recorded in over 40 datatypes, all machine-searchable. Every one of these is linked to a specific sense of the headword and supported by two or more unedited corpus examples.
Dante was designed by the Lexicography MasterClass and created under its direction by a team of 20 highly skilled lexicographers. The database was commissioned by Foras na Gaeilge.
Download our information leaflet (pdf)
Searching this database is easy with our user-friendly query-builder. Hit ‘Search the database’ to get an idea of what Dante can offer you, or go to Getting Started for a full explanation of Dante's search function
The Lexicography MasterClass
Who needs Dante?
Publishers
- making new bilingual dictionaries with English as source language
- making new monolingual English dictionaries
- enhancing dictionaries for electronic publication
- updating existing dictionaries
- creating a dictionary DTD
Language Engineers
- word sense disambiguation
- information extraction
- question answering
- grammar checking
- machine translation
Linguists / Researchers
- research on the English lexicon
Language Teachers
- finding language patterns
- building lessons