A little Latin for your iPhone.
Everyone who's taken introductory Latin at a university knows the terror of watching an octogenarian professor struggle through the doorway of the classroom wrestling with a monstrous tome that looks like it belongs on some forgotten shelf gathering dust in Hogwarts. What on Earth is that, gasps every cataplectic first-year in unison?
Why, it's the dictionary you'll have to use if you want any of your teachers to take you seriously. A Latin Dictionary, edited by Lewis and Short, is a testament to the intellectual and intestinal fortitude of nineteenth-century Latinists. It's also the leading cause of work-related injuries for classical philologists.
But this is 2011. Why should you have to lug around a twenty-pound tome to keep up with Virgil or Persius? Save your spine, put a little Latin in your pocket. Lexidium gives you the original, full-length Lewis and Short in a much more manageable size. It's now available for all Apple iOS devices.
Numeral Converter
Copyright MMXI.
Our apps automatically convert back and forth between ancient numerals and their modern Arabic equivalents. Double-check the date in your book's copyright notice (MMXI is easy, but can you figure MCCCLXVII?), or if you're reading Pindar, impress all your friends by being able to tell them that etei b' olympiados oq' is the second year of the 79th Olympiad (and hence 459 BCE.)
Short Definitions
Life's too short for long entries.
As edifying as it can be to journey through the long, serpentine valleys of LSJ's entries on every word uttered in the Greek language between Homer and Nonnus (bonus points if you know who that is), sometimes you just want to pin down the basic meaning of a word. We've got you covered. Every lexical entry in Lexidium and Lexiphanes has a short definition at the very top you can glance at and move on. Sometimes the short definitions aren't perfect. No worries! You can edit them for your own personal reference, and your changes are transmitted anonymously back to us so we can fix them for future versions of our applications. Every definition you help improve is one small step toward better scholarship for all philologists.
Universal App
Twofer.
When you buy Lexidium, you get two apps for the price of one. Use it on all of your iOS devices, and enjoy an optimized large-format version on your iPad.
Text Any Size
Your eyes, saved.
Stop squinting! With Lexidium, the size of the Lewis and Short's print all depends on you. Embiggen the text to scrutinize an entry, then make it smaller again to keep skimming. Your eyes will thank you later.
Parsimonious
Inflection is hard. Get help, read faster.
Whether you're in the school library or on the peaks of Mount Athos, sometimes you're in a hurry to find the entry for a difficult word form like bobus or legissent. Our Parsimonious lexical engine uses the magic of finite-state transduction to convert more or less any inflected Greek or Latin word, no matter how obscure or rare, into its dictionary form. You don't even need an Internet connection.
100% Unicode
Industry standard.
Gone are the dark ages of "Greek fonts," when putting Greek on a computer screen meant transcribing it using mangled Latin script and applying one of a dozen mutually incompatible typefaces to transmute it into Hellenic script. Our apps are built using Unicode, the international standard text interchange format. If you want to email some text or send it to a paper you're writing, it's as easy as copy and paste.
Get it!
You can download Lexidium today from the iTunes Store.
Support
It's a sad fact of life that any app can malfunction, and Lexidium is no exception. But don't panic! First, check out the Bug Bottle to see if your issue's been reported by someone else. There might already be a fix in the works or a way for you to get around it. If you've been genuinely blessed with the misfortune of encountering a heretofore-unknown problem, drop it in the Bug Bottle and I'll get right on it. I try to answer most new bug reports in 1 business day, but do bear in mind that I'm easily distracted and may not gratify you instantly.
