The Braille Universal Dictionary
827,591 words. 1,594 languages. Hebrew, braille, and a concept bridge that ties them together. Built because the Word belongs to people who read with their hands, and because most translation tools stop at the languages that pay.
What This Is
A single dictionary that holds a word, its meaning, its translations, and its braille form in one place. Ask it for a word and it answers with the concept behind the word, not only the spelling: what domain it belongs to, what it means in a biblical context, how often it appears in the source corpus, and what it looks like in braille. It runs on this ministry's own server. No outside translation service is called, and nothing you look up leaves the building.
What It Holds
- 827,591 words in the word dictionary, indexed by concept rather than by spelling alone.
- 1,594 languages served, with 1,597 entries in the language inventory and 216 name aliases.
- 1,596 universal seed words, the concept spine every translation hangs from.
- 98 braille character mappings across 230 catalogued characters: 34 Greek, 26 English, 22 pointed Hebrew, 16 UEB grade-1.
- Hebrew returned with full vowel pointing, transliteration, and a Strong's-style concept code.
- Corpus frequency on every result, so you can see how common a word actually is rather than guessing.
See It Work
Ask for love in Hebrew and it returns אַהֲבָה, transliterated ahavah, braille ⠁ַ⠑ֲ⠃ָ⠑, concept code אהב, with the English source rendered ⠇⠕⠧⠑ and 14,817 occurrences recorded in the corpus. It classes the word under a biblical-theological domain and glosses it as love as affection, devotion, covenant loyalty, or charity. Ask for God and it returns אֵל, braille ⠁ֵ⠇, with 139,796 occurrences. These are live results from the running dictionary, produced the moment this page was written, not examples chosen from a brochure.
Why It Exists
Scripture has always travelled further than the people carrying it. Braille readers and speakers of small languages are usually last in line for good tools, because the market for them is thin. That is a reason to build it in a ministry rather than a company. The great commission is omni-channel: every screen, every feed, every language, and every way a person takes words in, including with their fingers.
What It Cannot Do Yet
- It is deepest in English. Breadth across the other 1,593 languages is at seed level, meaning the concept spine is present but the vocabulary behind it is thin.
- 8,538 braille collisions, covering 19,073 words, 2.30% of the dictionary. Where several words share one braille form the conversion is one-way: a word turned into braille and back may not return unchanged. The worst cases are romanised CJK, where 19 different Japanese words share the single form for shi.
- 132 of the 230 catalogued characters still have no braille mapping, among them the accented Latin letters a-umlaut, o-slash, ae, eszett and the Cyrillic range. A word containing one of those cannot be rendered completely.
- It is a dictionary and a concept bridge, not a translator. It will not carry a sentence, and it does not replace a translation committee or a human who knows the language.