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The Lexicon
When you first open Lexicanter, you’ll find yourself on the Lexicon tab. This is the place where you will be adding words to your lexicon. This tab is composed of three panels: the alphabet panel, the editor panel, and the lexicon panel itself.
Under the tab navigation at the top of the app, you’ll see two checkboxes and the alphabet text input.
- Case Sensitivity will make letters case sensitive making the app alphabetize ‘A’ differently for ‘a’, for example.
- Ignore Diacritics is on by default and turning it off will make the app alphabetize ‘a’ separately from ‘â’.
The alphabet field is where you organize the alphabet of your conlang. This will determine the order of your words in the lexicon. Any letters or symbols you use in your words can be added here and will alphabetize the lexicon according to the order you write here. Each alphabetization token should be separated by a space: this way, it is possible to alphabetize multi-character tokens (ie 'sh') separately from single-character tokens and other multi-character tokens (ie 's', 'sz').
Below the Alphabet panel we have the Editor panel on the left, where you can add new words and edit existing words. In the Editor panel, you’ll see three text boxes when using the default settings. There are some advanced settings which alter the appearance of this tab, which you can read about on other pages in this wiki.
The text box under ‘New Word’ is where you type your new words. The intention is that you use your romanized orthography here, although technically this is not necessary. Under this text box is where the pronunciation will automatically fill in. Lexicanter automatically updates pronunciations in your lexicon based on rules you can specify in the Phonology tab. See Pronunciation Rules to read up on how to write these.
If the pronunciation is manually altered, it will not automatically update unless the word itself is edited, so keep this in mind when making manual changes.
The next text field is for the definition of the word. If the word has multiple definitions, you may write all of them in this first text box if you wish; however, Lexicanter offers a way you can format multiple definitions separately. By clicking the ‘Add Sense’ button, you can create another set of text boxes for another definition and its tags.
Tags are a useful way to organize and filter through the words in your lexicon, and they can also be utilized by advanced users for setting up automatic inflection tables. Each sense of a word is allowed to have its own set of tags. Tags are arbitrary space-separated terms which will appear above the sense definition in the lexicon, and can be searched by. One advantage to using multiple senses for separate definitions is that they can each have their own tags.
Clicking the ‘Add Word’ button will add your new word to the lexicon on the right. If you attempt to add a word that already exists, you will be given the option to ‘overwrite’ or ‘append the definition’ to the existing word. To edit the word, right-click on it in the lexicon panel.
In the lexicon panel, there are three text boxes along the top. These are the lexicon’s search functions. You can search the lexicon for specific words, definitions, and tags.
There are some special functions which can be applied to help find specific entries. The character ^ means word boundary.
Searching for ^an will only show results which start with 'an', and searching an^ will only show results that end with 'an'. Just searching 'an' will show results which have 'an' anywhere in the word.
In both the tags and definition searches, you can prefix your search with ! to only show results which have your search term as a whole word. For example, searching for the tag culture will also show words tagged 'agriculture' and 'horticulture', but searching for !culture will only show words tagged 'culture'.