This is “The Century Dictionary and Cyclopaedia”, printed in 1889, the biggest dictionary of the 19th century.
I tried OCR tools, but they made many mistakes. So I decided to type it letter by letter from this scanned version:
https://archive.org/details/CenDic
This is only the words that begin with AA or AB. Please take a look at it and tell me your suggestions to make a better glossary from this valuable dictionary.
If anyone volunteers to co-operate in this project, please let me know.
https://www.mediafire.com/file/v5xjg56v4eeyynn/Century+Dictionary±+A+to+ABZUG.zip/file
The dictionary is so old and it’s so burdensome a job to get the full text, do you really need to make it into a mdx? There are so many better modern dictionaries in mdx form available nowadays. I could not see what makes it so important.
一些老的词典可能有历史意义
这几个例子看着就不错,支持。
This dictionary is in 8513 pages in a tiny font size. It contains many words that is mentioned in 20th century dics, even in the 20-volume OED or the huge Webster Unabridged. It’s a time machine that brings people to an ancient world with unheard words. How funny that in this dic there are no words such as “girlfriend”.
It seems girlfriend has not a timemachine to go back. That’s funny. ![]()
OCR is the way to do this. This is one of those English dictionaries that has great linguistic historical value. Appreciate your work.
Thank you. Sorry for delay. The Intermet was down for 6 months here in Iran.
This is the biggest dictionary in history, even larget than Webster Unabridged, OED, etc. Many of its entries are not present in those two. I confess that it’s not useful nowadays, but it has historical, scientific, and linguistical importance. Many archaic words are defined only in this dictionary. Surprising, OED has cited it 20,000 times. I believe it’s a treasure that must not extinguish.
Of course I tried OCR in the beginning, but the printing is 110+ years ago and I witnessed that the ocr mistakes are very frequent. Moreover, I try to format the examples and encyclopedic paragraphs, so I decided to type it manually.
I’m just here to suggest that you don’t waste any time on this. The harsh truth is that it’s never going to see the light of day. You will probably lose interest before it’s finished. It’s a massive undertaking.
Also: I am on the autistic spectrum, and this is something I could see myself doing (manually typing a massive book, or otherwise trying to create “order” where there isn’t any, or arrange information). I mean no offence, but is there a chance that you might be as well? I would suggest that you drop all this.
Please don’t try to type the whole thing out. ML models will soon be able to cheaply do this, if today’s OCR turn out to be inadequate.
It seems that the dictionary has already been created. Please visit the following link: Century Dictionary, 1889
That is created by me! I downloaded 400,000 Html files from www.wordnik.com. About 190,000 of them had relevent content. It had no example, thesaraus, image, synonyms or encyclopedic information.
Some decisions like “shall entry A have a link to B or not?” No machine can decide it. I think it deserves spending time.




