Category Archives: PanLex Database


PanLex on the Moon


February 21, 2019 ||

PanLex has long envisioned having a global impact for the good of humanity. Now PanLex is going beyond Earth, to the Moon! Press release: The Arch Mission Foundation today announced the upcoming launch of the first installment of their Lunar Library™, a 30 million page archive of civilization, created as a backup to planet Earth. […]


Fake Words Are Based On Real Words


January 14, 2019 ||

Each month, PanLex generates and publishes new “fake words” such as “unequalitis” and “adjustache” to entertain our newsletter readers in the Fake Word of the Month challenge. But how, exactly, are these fake words generated? We use an emergent property of the linguistic information contained in the PanLex Database, and a simple probabilistic algorithm. Translation quality […]


How Lev Became Leo and Leon


January 3, 2019 ||

Proper nouns (names of unique things in the world, such as Berkeley and James) can be translated in the same way as common nouns (names of classes of things, such as city and person). For example, the same city in Ukraine is known as Lviv in English, Львів (L’viv) in Ukrainian, Львов (L’vov) in Russian, Lwów in Polish, and Lemberg […]


Indonesian Languages in PanLex


December 13, 2018 ||

The PanLex Database currently contains lexical translation data from 549 languages spoken in Indonesia. Each dot on this map represents one of those languages, scaled to show the number of words in that language that PanLex has collected. With the help of our supporters, PanLex will be able to increase our coverage of languages for […]


Enabling Radically Inclusive Machine Translation (part 3)


November 29, 2018 ||

In the first two posts in this series, we elaborated our belief that all people should be able to use their native language to exercise human rights and have access to opportunity. We showed that machine translation technology currently falls far short of this goal, but that there are realistic ways to make progress. In […]