Classical Persian quotes Arabic outright — Hafez opens with a whole hemistich
of it — and none of it resolved before. The full Arabic export brings 36,627
entries and 819,608 new form pairs, and the forms are the point: السّاقی,
الناس, تَلْقَ and تَهْوی are all conjugated or carry the article, so they only
reach a definition through that index. Nine of the ten Arabic words in the
sample now answer where none did.
The cost is real and worth stating: the database goes from 28 MB to 87 MB and
the release APK from 10.6 MB to 29.2 MB, with another 87 MB unpacked on first
run, so about 116 MB installed.
Results are now ordered the way a reader of this app wants them: the Urdu
definition first, because it needs no translating, then Persian, then sources
keyed on another language, with English arriving only through whatever is left.
Arabic sorts last outright — its index is larger than every other source
combined, which makes it the likeliest to match by coincidence.
No Persian-to-Urdu dictionary. Wiktionary's Persian entries carry no
translations at all; the tables live only on English pages, in a 3.3 GB export,
so it would mean pivoting through an English sense. A sample of that file
projects about 6,900 Persian words with any Urdu equivalent, mostly modern
dictionary vocabulary rather than the language of the poems — not worth the
pivot. tools/README.md records why, so the question doesn't get reopened from
scratch.
Verified on an API 36 emulator: عشق returns all five sources with the Urdu
definition at the top.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two Urdu sources join the Persian ones. Wiktionary's Urdu extract gives Urdu
headwords glossed in English, and Urdu Wiktionary itself gives definitions
written in Urdu — the only source here that does. The latter is thin, about
3,100 usable entries out of 31,000 pages since many are stubs, but for a word
it carries an Urdu reader is better served by it than by a translation into
English: عشق comes back as شدید جذبۂ محبت، گہری چاہت، محبت، پریم، پیار.
Every definition now names the dictionary and its language pair, and lays out
in the direction its own script reads, so an Urdu definition is right-aligned
beside a left-aligned English one.
When nothing matches, the sheet offers near words ranked by how many letters
they share with what was looked up, drawn from an index range scan on the
leading letters rather than a scan of the whole table. خودکامی, which has no
entry, offers خودکامه — the lemma it wants.
Measured honestly: the Urdu sources add little coverage over Persian — nine
words from the English-glossed extract, two from Urdu Wiktionary, against
1,285 from thirteen poems. They are here because an Urdu reader wants Urdu,
not because they widen the net.
The suggestion ranking is verified against the built database rather than only
on device: خودکامی → خودکامه, شیرازی → شیراز, مشکلها → مشکل. On an API 36
emulator all four sources answer عشق with their labels.
Known rough edge: affix stripping across four languages can mislead. ناولها
reaches ناول, the Urdu for "novel", which is not what Hafez meant. The matched
headword is always shown, so it is visible rather than silent.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Tapping a word in a poem now opens its meaning. Neither source covers enough
alone — Daneshjoo reaches 71% of real poem vocabulary — so both ship, each row
carrying its source so the credit stays attached and either can be dropped
later. Together with the lookup chain that reaches 88%, and 13 of the 55
remaining misses are Arabic lines quoted inside Persian poems.
Lookup widens until something matches: the word as written, the lemma it
inflects from, the word with an affix stripped, then the parts of a ZWNJ
compound. The lemma step is what makes classical verse readable, and it comes
from Wiktionary's 149,589 form->lemma pairs: افتاد is only findable as افتادن.
The Arabic definite article is stripped too, since poems quote Arabic.
Two things the build taught me. Wiktionary's 93 MB export is 0.94 MB of
definitions wrapped in inflection tables, etymology templates and IPA, so
tools/build_dictionary.py keeps the definitions and the form index and drops
the rest. And the packager silently gunzips .gz assets and strips the
extension, which shipped the database under a name the code wasn't opening —
every lookup failed silently until the APK listing gave it away.
Hit testing needed care as well: nastaliq is set with 2.4x leading, so most of
a line box is empty space, and a tap there clamps to the line's first
character — which made every tap return the opening word. Taps are now checked
against the baseline band, with the multipliers left as a knob for swapped
fonts. Definitions are English, so they read left-to-right inside the
otherwise right-to-left sheet.
Verified on the release build, where R8 could have broken the SQLite path:
tapping عشق returns both sources, and دانند resolves to دانستن.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
