Armenian - Russian dictionary

The digitization process of the Armenian-Russian dictionary of the dictionary, published by a circulation of 100,000 pieces in 1985 by the Academy of Sciences of the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, was recently completed . Work on the dictionary took more than 20 years and became an important event for a small republic. The dictionary contains words from many dialects of the Armenian language as well as the most commonly used words and meanings of the Western Armenian spoken by residents of the Diaspora: mainly from the USA, France, Iran.

We started digitizing it a few years ago, we did it in our spare time and therefore we finished it only now, although according to my calculations, we spent no more than 600 man-hours for everything. The primary goal was to create a dict version for programs like StarDict or GoldenDict . This stage is completed and in the future we plan to create a well-formatted xdxf file and finally, at the last stage, we will translate it fully to the Internet for online translations.

In the process of work were involved software:

• FineReader
• vim
• google docs

It was interesting to know that

• The compilers of the dictionary are simple people and can leave a bunch of blunders.
• Words and vocabulary entries are not the same. So in the dictionary stated 75,000 words, but by the end of the work it turned out that there were only 64259 entries in it . I still do not understand where the figure of 75,000 came from.
• A bunch of words were revealed by the layers of history about which I did not even suspect: handkerchiefs that were used to tie a woman’s mouth in pre-revolutionary villages, harems, instruments of torture at school (naturally pre-revolutionary), etc.

Considering the time of creation, it is natural that many words are already outdated: for example, “petty-bourgeois” or “gorkom”, but this in turn gives the dictionary the status of an intangible monument of its era.