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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>
3.2 KiB
Building the dictionary
app/src/main/assets/dictionary.db.gz is generated, not hand-written. This rebuilds it:
pip install readmdict python-lzo # lzo needs the C library: brew install lzo
curl -L -o fa.jsonl https://kaikki.org/dictionary/Persian/kaikki.org-dictionary-Persian.jsonl
curl -L -o daneshjoo.mdx \
"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/0xdolan/Daneshjoo/main/Daneshjoo%20Dictionary/Daneshjoo%20Dictionary.mdx"
python3 build_dictionary.py
gzip -9 ganjoor-dictionary.db
Why two sources
Neither alone is enough. Measured against every distinct word in five real poems (Hafez ×2, Saadi's Golestan, Rumi's Masnavi, a Khayyam rubaʿi — 485 words):
| coverage | |
|---|---|
| Daneshjoo alone | 71% |
| Wiktionary alone + its form index | ~80% |
| Both, with the lookup chain | 88% |
13 of the 55 remaining misses are Arabic lines quoted inside Persian poems, so Persian coverage is about 91%.
Wiktionary's export is 93 MB, of which the definitions are 0.94 MB — the rest is inflection
tables, etymology templates, IPA and descendants. The build keeps the definitions and the
form→lemma index (149,589 pairs) and drops the rest. That index is what resolves conjugated
verbs: افتاد → افتادن, بگشاید → گشودن, دانند → دانستن.
Urdu sources
curl -L -o ur.jsonl https://kaikki.org/dictionary/Urdu/kaikki.org-dictionary-Urdu.jsonl
curl -L -o urwikt.xml.bz2 \
https://dumps.wikimedia.org/urwiktionary/latest/urwiktionary-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2
bunzip2 -k urwikt.xml.bz2
The first gives Urdu headwords glossed in English. The second is Urdu Wiktionary itself, the only source here whose definitions are written in Urdu — thin (around 3,100 usable entries out of 31,000 pages, many being stubs), but for a word it does carry an Urdu reader is better served by it than by a translation into English.
Arabic
curl -L -o ar.jsonl https://kaikki.org/dictionary/Arabic/kaikki.org-dictionary-Arabic.jsonl
521 MB, almost all of it the inflection index, and that index is the point: the Arabic quoted inside Persian verse is conjugated, so السّاقی, الناس, تَلْقَ and تَهْوی only reach a definition through it. 36,627 entries and 819,608 new form pairs for about 59 MB of database.
Why there is no Persian-to-Urdu
Wiktionary's Persian entries carry no translations at all — the translation tables live only on English pages, in a 3.3 GB export. Going Persian to Urdu would mean pivoting through an English sense, and a sample of that file projects only about 6,900 Persian words with any Urdu equivalent, most of them modern dictionary vocabulary rather than the language of the poems. The definitions written in Urdu therefore come from Urdu Wiktionary directly, and are preferred over the English ones wherever they exist.
Licences
Each row carries its source, so attribution stays accurate and either source can be dropped
without rebuilding the other.
- Wiktionary — CC BY-SA 3.0. The generated database is therefore also CC BY-SA 3.0.
- Daneshjoo — the repository states MIT. Note the underlying lexicon is a published Iranian dictionary, so that relicensing is worth verifying before relying on it.