About

What is it?

Rabbitique is a multilingual etymology dictionary that searches and collects etymological information across multiple word variations and languages and creates a satellite view of the word’s context and points to the concept that it was designated to materialise. The intention is to emphasise similarities rather than differences and allow the user a delightful digital experience that makes the information digestible and actionable.

What is Etymology anyway?

Etymology is the study of the history of words. Words have a past, they change and grow as they evolve. Words are remains of culture, the traces left behind by years of cultural change, so by examining their origin we gain insight into the culture that created them, what semantic frame has been associated with a word throughout its history. However, we must remember that the meanings of words do change over time, and what a word means now, quite often is not what it used to mean in its origin. Tracing back words origins is cumbersome because the information may be scattered or incomplete. This is where Rabbitique fits in.

How it works?

The application is powered by the dictionary data extracted from Wiktionary data dumps, complemented and combined with various supplementary information about languages, affices, countries and so on. The data is by no means complete, but for the time being, it is the most comprehensive digital data publicly available. Rabbitique implements a sophisticated search algorithm to search this data using graphs and data manipulation techniques in order to remedy incorrect and incomplete data coming from the sources. Since the underlying data about word etymologies is crowdsourced, it is prone to inconsistencies and we are constantly working to improve the accuracy and ignore outliers.