Glossary

We use a few more specialized terms to describe the nature of this project. Here's a list of some terms and their definitions.

Word entry

A word that is represented as a MongoDB document which includes metadata information like definitions, part of speech, and more.

Nsịbịdị

Nsịbịdị (opens in a new tab) is a proto-writing system that originates from the western region of Africa, which is modern day Nigeria.

Related terms

Word entries can be connected to one another through the relatedTerms field. This field is an array of word Ids that point to other word documents which also could be connected to other related terms. This structure forms a complex graph of interconnected related words.

Word stems

Many Igbo words are formed by combining more simplistic words that we refer to as 'word stems'. Whenever a word has word stems, that means that it was made up of smaller words.

Dialectal variations

Igbo has more than 30 known dialects that are mutually intelligible, meaning that a speaker from one dialect has a good chance of understanding a speaker from another dialect. We want to best showcase the robust nature of the Igbo language by associating dialectal variations with each word entry.

Diacritic

A visual tone mark that denotes the pronunciation of a word. All our headwords include diacritics.