Shamy Dictionary

Shamy Dictionary is an offline Arabic-English dictionary with a Syrian slant.

The Shamy dictionary program provides English glosses of Arabic words entered in Unicode or transliteration, and Arabic stems for English gloss words entered in Latin script.

Arabic words may include any of the affixes usual in written Arabic, as well as some of those unique to (spoken) Damascus Arabic, hence the name, Shamy Dictionary, after Sham, a local name for Damascus.

The program may be used without an Arabic input method by using the transliteration option, or it may be used with an Arabic soft keyboard like edu.fitchburgstate.csc.arabicIME.

It is based on ARAMORPH 1.0 (copyleft Tim Buckwalter) and the majority of the vocabulary comes from that database, so that it is oriented toward the newspaper domain, but it also includes some common Shamy vocabulary.

The dictionary database is part of the application; unlike some other Arabic apps, Shamy Dictionary runs completely offline, and there is no need to access the web to look up words.

The sources and the dictionary database are available under the GNU license; contact the developer at staylor@fitchburgstate.edu.