The Intercontinental Dictionary Series (IDS) is an open-access, comparative lexical database that organizes topical vocabulary lists across the world’s languages to facilitate historical, comparative, and typological linguistics.

Founded by Mary Ritchie Key and edited today by Bernard Comrie, it records the words for the same 1,310 concepts, from “water” and “mother” to “star”, in 337 languages, so they can be compared side by side. Each word list is a Living Dictionary here, so its community can keep adding words, audio and example sentences.

The original IDS website: ids.clld.org Published by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. This page is the living copy on Living Dictionaries.

Data: Key, Mary Ritchie & Comrie, Bernard (eds.) 2023. The Intercontinental Dictionary Series. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. · CC BY 4.0