Instruction Page

How to Search:

Use the sidebar on the left to search. The sidebar is visible on every page on the site.

To search, type in your search term in the appropriate box (depending on what language you wish to search in) and hit the search button for that box.

To retrieve all words in the database, type in a * (an asterisk) in the Ottoman search box and hit the search button for that box.

When you search in Ottoman you search through all Ottoman words in the dictionary and all words that contain your search term are retrieved, so searching for “al” will return “ṣalmaḳ” and yalancı, because they both contain that term. However, if you select the “Exact matches” check box and search for “al” only that word itself will be retrieved if it in the database.

When you search for English or Turkish terms, the English or Turkish translations are searched, respectively. They are searched loosely, so if you search for “cat,” both “cat”, “catacomb” and “scat” will be retrieved.

After you hit a search button you will be taken to a page with a list of all Ottoman words for entries that contained your search term. To see the full listing for any entry just click on the Ottoman word.

You can do this type of search from anywhere on the website.

How do contribute words to the dictionary:

Contact Walter G. Andrews at walter@u.washington.edu to obtain a login and password. Walter will need to check your credentials and knowledge of the Ottoman language before he allows you to submit entries to the dictionary.

Press the “Submit” link under the webpage title banner to go to the submit page. Use your login and password to log in.

Choose the number of citations that you want to enter for the word you wish to enter; you are required to enter at least one citation. Choose the number of English definitions you want to enter and the number of Turkish definitions you wish to enter (definitions are long descriptions of a word that really describe what a word means or something special about the word or its use). Then choose the number of English translations you wish to enter and the number of Turkish translations you wish to enter (translations are one or two word “direct” translations of the Ottoman term you are entering). Press “Submit” at the bottom of the page to generate a submission form.

Enter all the data you wish to enter on the submission form. The Ottoman word itself, its grammatical form, a citation that uses this word, and a citation source are required. All other fields are optional.

When you enter data please use digraphs to represent special characters that are not representable in lower ASCII. To see a list of such characters and their corresponding digraphs click on the “Digraphs” link under the title banner. For example the character ā is represented as {a=}, so to enter the Ottoman word “kemān” you would type in “kem{a=}n.” Please use digraphs in both the Ottoman word, the citation and citation origin fields. Also use digraphs in the Turkish translation and definition fields. (You can use Microsoft Word’s “Search and Replace” function to type your text in whatever encoding you would like and then replace the special characters with the digraphs.)

Please use the Unicode values to enter in the Arabic transform text, the codes are available through the “Arabic” link under the title banner. Please enter the code for each character separated by spaces.

When you are done completing the form, press “Preview” at the bottom of the page. You will be taken to a page that shows what you have entered, please make sure that everything is showing up ok and that you did not make any mistakes. If you need to make any corrections press “Edit” at the bottom of the page and you will be taken to the previous page, otherwise press “Confirm” to submit your entry to the database.

Repeat this process to enter in additional words.

If when you press “Confirm” you get an error message saying that this entry already exits in the database please go back and change the grammatical form or origin of the word (to make it unique) or edit the word instead (the edit feature is not yet available for use).