A reverse dictionary is a dictionary alphabetized by the reversal of each entry: Before computers, reverse dictionaries were tedious to produce. The first computer-produced was Stahl and Scavnicky's A Reverse Dictionary of the Spanish Language, in 1974. The first computer-produced reverse dictionary for a single text was Wisbey, R., ''Vollständige Verskonkordanz zur Wiener Genesis. Mit einem rückläufigen Wörterbuch zum Formenbestand'', Berlin, E. Schmidt, 1967.

Definition

In a reverse word dictionary, the entries are alphabetized by the last letter first, then next to last, and so on. In them, words with the same suffix appear together. This can be useful for linguists and poets looking for words ending with a particular suffix, or by an epigrapher or forensics specialist examining a damaged text (e.g. a stone inscription, or a burned document) that had only the final portion of a word. Reverse dictionaries of this type have been published for most major alphabetical languages.

Applications

Applications of reverse word dictionaries include:

Construction

Reverse word dictionaries are straightforward to construct, by simply sorting based on reversed words. This was labor-intensive and tedious before computers, but is now straightforward. By the same token, reverse dictionaries have become less important since online word lists can be searched dynamically.

Examples

English

Online

Physical

Other Languages

Akkadian

Albanian

Czech

Dutch

Estonian

Finnish

French

German

Cypriot-Greek

Greek, modern

Greek, ancient

Hebrew

Hebrew and Aramaic

Hungarian

Indian, old

Italian

Latin

Macedonian

Manchu

Mongolian

Russian

Serbo-Croatian

Slovak

Slovene

Spanish

Turkish

Welsh