Whitaker's Words

Ian Douglas Scott

About this app

This is a port of William Whitaker's words program to android.

Words has an extensive dictionary of the Latin language as well as the capability to recognize various morphological forms and determine what the root word is as well as the what form it is in. Unlike other apps based on Whitaker's words, this is a port of the original code rather than simply using the dictionary, and therefore essentially feature complete compared to the desktop program.

This app is ad-free, open source, and requires no permissions.

Source code: https://github.com/ids1024/whitakers-words-android
Bug tracker: https://github.com/ids1024/whitakers-words-android/issues

Ratings and reviews

Where would I be without this app? I like to pray the Breviary in Latin. There is plenty of obscure vocabulary from various centuries therein. Whitaker's has all the words, and is swift and easy to use. My only wish is that it would save recent searches or allow starring/highlighting of entries so that one could make a list of vocabulary for review. (Word Reference has this feature.) But it's a fantastic, utterly simple, and incredibly useful app.

I teach Latin at the middle and high school levels and I use this app every day. The definitions are great and the parsing is very helpful. Figuring out what the abbreviations mean can be difficult but once you do it's not a problem. I recommend this app to my students all the time and I think it would be helpful to anyone interested in translating Latin.

After the most recent update it no longer works! It kept complaining "failed to execute words"! I am on Pixel 6 pro with Android 13. Update fixed it! Thanks for the author for being so responsive! Now it works well.

What's new

Update words binary to 64-bit
- May be needed on newer devices