About this dictionary

This is a free dictionary between Bahasa (Indonesian and Malay) and English. It is built from open linguistic data, not written by hand, so it is wide rather than deep: it tells you which meanings a word can have, which words share them, and how common the word really is. It has no example sentences or pronunciation yet.

Where the meanings come from

Two open projects do the work. Princeton WordNet 3.0 groups English words into synsets: sets of words that mean the same thing, each with a short definition. Wordnet Bahasa attaches Indonesian and Malay words to those same synsets. Looking up a Bahasa word finds the synsets it is attached to, and the English definition and English synonyms come from the synset.

WordNet® is a large lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. — Princeton University

Every link between a Bahasa word and a synset carries a quality grade from the Wordnet Bahasa project. We only use the two best grades, and mark the lower of them "Less certain link between this word and this sense". Senses are grouped by part of speech and ordered by how reliable the link is, then by how common the sense is in English. Some links are still odd, so read a long list of senses as a set of leads, not as a verdict.

How common is a word

The frequency shown on each word page comes from counting how often the word appears in a large collection of Indonesian text. The rank is its position among all words counted (1 is the most common), and the labels follow the rank: Essential up to 100, Very common up to 1,000, Common up to 5,000, Less common up to 20,000, and Rare beyond that. The words suggested on the home page are drawn at random from the top 1,000.

Word families

Bahasa builds many words from a root with prefixes and suffixes: besar becomes membesarkan, kebesaran and pembesaran. We link such words to their root with a rule-based stemmer that knows the main prefixes (meN-, peN-, ber-, ter-, di-, ke-, se-, per-), the suffixes (-kan, -an, -i, -nya) and the sound changes they cause, such as tulis turning into menulis. It accepts a root only when that root is a known dictionary word and common enough to be plausible. It is automatic, so it will sometimes pick the wrong root, and it only links words that appear often enough in the text to be counted.

Privacy

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Data licences

WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. It is used under the WordNet licence, which allows use, copying, modification and distribution provided this notice is kept. Princeton University makes no representations or warranties about it. Wordnet Bahasa is by its authors and is used under the terms on its project page.