A Second Edition

This summer I've started working on a second edition of Lyre's Dictionary, written from scratch and much more ambitious. I'm very early into building it, but I'm encouraged by the proof-of-concept work I've done so far, enough so that I feel ready to make it known.

Briefly, the three main goals for the new version are:

1. To make it, beyond just a program that generates words, a more serious attempt at simulating the history of English and its tributary languages.
2. To broaden the range of words that it can generate, both by drawing more deeply from the languages I worked with in the first edition, as well as by bringing in new ones.
3. To add more details to the resulting entries, so that they feel richer and more like the entries in a real dictionary.

I'm planning to take my time with this one, so that I can approach every part of it with more foresight and rigor than the first version, working with an eye not just to output but to writing code that feels well-formed and in the simulationist spirit.

While the new edition is cooking, the old one will continue running online as usual. I may make some tweaks here or there to my taste, but I don't plan to do any more significant work on it.

Hinc ad astra.

– Robin, August 2026