Verba

Verba is a command-line lexicon and parser for Latin, in the spirit of Whitaker’s WORDS. I wanted the reference shelf available where I actually read — in a terminal, next to the text — rather than in a browser tab or a photographed page of Lewis & Short.

Here it is, asked about its own name — the opening of the Lewis & Short article, citations and all:

$ verba lat verba --full
'verba' → lemma:
━━ verbum, i, n., noun ━━
a word
   · gen. plur. verbūm, ), n. from the root er; Gr. ΕΡω, whence εἴρω and ῥῆμα, what is spoken or
     said; Goth. vaurd; Germ. Wort; Engl. word, a word; plur. words, expressions, language,
     discourse, conversation, etc. (: vox, vocabulum).
  I. — In gen. “verbum nullum fecit” Plaut. Bacch. 4, 9, 58: “si ullum verbum faxo”
     Plaut. Men. 1, 2, 47: “qui verbum numquam in publico fecerunt” Cic. Brut. 78, 270;
     ⋮

It is one Python file over freely-licensed dictionaries, with a mode for each way you might come at a word:

• parse — full morphological analysis: the dictionary head-form reconstructed (amavit → amo), every possible parse, Whitaker’s terse meaning, and a condensed Lewis & Short gloss.
• lat — the full Lewis & Short article, condensed by default so it never floods the terminal; --full brings in the citations.
• ww — the quick Whitaker one-liner, when that is all you need.
• eng — English → Latin, from Smith & Hall (1871).
• syn — Ogilvie’s synonym and syntax notes (Horae Latinae).

Run bare, it opens an interactive session for browsing; given a query on the command line, it answers once and exits, so it pipes and scripts like any other tool — and sits happily behind an Emacs shell-command.

There is nothing to install beyond Python itself: the program is pure standard library, and the dictionary data ships prebuilt in the repository.

git clone https://github.com/daniel-persigehl/verba
cd verba && python3 verba.py lat virtus

The source lives at github.com/daniel-persigehl/verba. The dictionaries are public domain, except Lewis & Short (CC BY-SA); the repository’s attribution file has the particulars.