About the SEAlang Library Thai Dictionary Resources

These resources are primarily based on data developed by the Mary Haas Thai Dictionary Project (TDP, used with the permission of the U.S. Department of Education). Additional data are derived from standardized translation equivalents promulgated by the Royal Institute of Thailand (RI), and from NECTEC's LEXiTRON project (LEX). Note that there may be small inconsistencies in form and content of data from different sources.

The Thai Dictionary Project is justly famed; other work based on TDP data includes Haas's Thai-English Student's Dictionary (1964, Stanford University Press).  Haas's innovations include (learn more about Mary Haas's career and work on Thai):

-  accurate phonetic transcription and stress marking.

-  Thai-appropriate grammatical analysis and part-of-speech tagging.

-  indicating classifiers associated with nouns, and auxiliary terms associated with verbs.

-  marking usage restrictions; eg. intensifiers or bound modifiers, as well as social register.

-  including collocational features like elaborate expressions and reduplication.

CRCL is archiving the Haas team's original master data files, gathered (beginning in 1951) in support of a planned, but never completed, unabridged Thai-English dictionary. Our ongoing development of this data includes clarifying, correcting, modernizing, and extending this original work:

-  reanalyzing the phonetic representation in accordance with Haas's later comments (and modern practice);

-  correcting spelling errors, as well as many inconsistencies in defining and labeling individual entries and cross-references;

-  individually segmenting all compounds, and pointing the components back to appropriate headword senses, adding these when necessary;

-  analyzing and noting lexical and semantic relationships between derivative forms;

-  extending the data's coverage to include tens of thousands of new terms coined (and disseminated by the Thai Royal Institute) n the past four decades;

-  enriching individual entries in a number of ways, including extending the etymological analysis;

-  XML-tagging the material (following the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative), and making it accessible for Web-based applications like this one. Copyright notices The Mary R. Haas Thai Dictionary Project data was compiled pursuant to a contract between the United States Office of Education and the University of California, Berkeley, and is used with permission of the United States Department of Education, International Education Programs Service.