Using the Dictionary
How to look up Middle Egyptian words, understand their entries, and navigate between related terms.
Word Entries
PharaLex's dictionary contains over 45,000 entries from the Vygus Middle Egyptian Dictionary, supplemented with curated definitions from Wiktionary. Each word entry includes:
- Transliteration — the consonantal reading in Unicode and MdC format
- Translation — one or more English glosses
- Grammar — part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, etc.) with the original Vygus classification
- Hieroglyphic spelling — the word written in hieroglyphs, rendered as a quadrat group
- Notes — period, domain, or usage information (e.g., "late Egyptian", "mathematics")
Hieroglyphic Spellings
Many words have multiple attested spellings. The quadrat rendering shows signs arranged vertically and horizontally, following patterns learned from a corpus of 190 published texts. This produces authentic-looking groupings, though they may not match every scholarly convention.
Related Words
The "Related Words" section at the bottom of each word page shows entries that share similar spellings, transliterations, or meanings. These links are computed from a weighted relation index built across the full dictionary.
Finding Words
You can find words by:
- Searching for a transliteration (e.g., "nfr") or English translation (e.g., "beautiful")
- Clicking a word link on a glyph detail page (shows all words using that glyph)
- Clicking a word link in a text reader (shows the dictionary entry for that token)