[undotwa]

Are there any Latin lexicon programmes for Mac OS X that also support English -> Latin as well as Latin -> English? It would also be good for the programme to have an extensive list of idiomatic uses of Latin words and phrases.

I have tried WORDS and the programme is very good at what it does, however it would be nice to have a programme which has some of these aforementioned features.

[mchladek]

During the four semesters I had Latin I couldn't find anything better than WORDS. Here's an app that will do English - Latin. I've never used it though so I don't know how extensive the dictionary is.

I never found a good reference for idiomatic Latin online, in an app, or in book form. I just had to memorize them

edit: nice sig, BTW

[undotwa]

Originally Posted by mchladek

During the four semesters I had Latin I couldn't find anything better than WORDS. Here's an app that will do English - Latin. I've never used it though so I don't know how extensive the dictionary is.

I never found a good reference for idiomatic Latin online, in an app, or in book form. I just had to memorize them

edit: nice sig, BTW

I tried WordLookup from my Google search. From my experience with the Latin component, it is terrible. All it does is index the WORDS word list and create the translation from that.

When writing English -> Latin, I've been using the Notre Dame dictionary. I'm always asking myself however: is that how a Roman would have expressed it? Whenever I write Latin, it seems quite stilted. Should not some professor at Latin write a programme which details how to write Latin fluently?

You can find many phrasebooks and reference tools for nearly every idiomatic expression in a foreign language, but none for Latin. So is there anyone who knows of such a programme?

Edit: Also, when reading definitions for words, the nuances between synonyms are never really explained. It makes no difference really if your just trying to read Latin, but you never really get the full sense of it. So many puns in my reading I probably miss in my lacking of a comprehensive Latin lexicon!

WORDS is very good. It does give you a fairly precise definition. But wouldn't it be nice if these programs gave descriptive definitions, alike an English dictionary? A list of words IMHO is quite inferior to a nice couple of sentences which give some indication of the nuances in the word.