0df736fd89
Wiktionary carries pronunciation for 45,000 of these headwords and the build was throwing it away. It is now kept: 101,306 entries of IPA, each tagged with the variety it belongs to, which matters here because a word in a 14th-century ghazal was not said the way Tehran says it now — عشق is /ˈʔiʃq/ in Classical Persian and [ʔeʃɢ̥] in Iran today, and the app leads with the former. The IPA's dots and stress marks are the syllable breakdown. Urdu Wiktionary adds its own, in Urdu script: the fully vowelled spelling عِشْق and the split عِش + قوں, both pulled out of its wikitext. Costs 7.7 MB of database, taking it to 94 MB. Verified on an API 36 emulator: tapping عشق shows the Classical Persian IPA, the Urdu syllable split, the vowelled spelling and two modern variants above the definitions. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> |
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|---|---|---|
| .. | ||
| build_dictionary.py | ||
| README.md | ||
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.