News

Two-thirds through the decade: Living Dictionaries keeps growing

We are two-thirds of the way through the 2020s, and it is a good moment to look back at how far Living Dictionaries has come. What began in 2019 with a few dozen dictionaries has become a platform that communities and linguists around the world use every day.

Recordings
142,760
audio recordings, plus 22,806 photos
photos2019’20’21’22’23’24’252026photos2019’20’21’22’23’24’252026
Dictionaries
580
227 of them public, on the dictionary map
2019’20’21’22’23’24’252026
User accounts
6,612
accounts, 2,722 of them opened this year
2019’20’21’22’23’24’252026
Visitors in September 20265,476people made 14,979 visits
Living Dictionaries since its first dictionaries in 2019, counted by the year each recording, photo, dictionary or account was added (2026 through October 30). Dictionaries are counted as on the Living Dictionaries home page: every public dictionary plus unlisted ones with at least a few entries.

By the numbers

  • 580 dictionaries are being built on Living Dictionaries, and 227 of them are public, listed on the dictionary map for anyone to browse.
  • Together they hold more than 600,000 entries, about 143,000 audio recordings and nearly 23,000 photos. The number of recordings has nearly doubled since the end of 2023.
  • There are 6,612 user accounts. 2,722 of them were opened this year alone, more than in all the years through 2024 combined.
  • In September, 5,476 people visited Living Dictionaries, making 14,979 visits.

Every one of those numbers stands for the work of speakers, community members and researchers who decided their language deserved a place online. Thank you.

A year of upgrades

Living Dictionaries has had its biggest year of improvements yet:

  • Faster everywhere. A dictionary now loads into your browser, so search and editing are instant, and your changes sync in the background.
  • Texts and sentences. Dictionaries can now hold stories, conversations and other texts, broken into sentences that link to their words. Audio plays along line by line, and timings can be lined up automatically.
  • Word families. Related words can be grouped into families that trace them back to a shared ancestor.
  • Maps and places. Entries, dialects and texts can be tied to the places where they are spoken, on maps that we now host ourselves.
  • Try before you publish. Anyone can start a dictionary as a private sandbox, explore every feature, and publish when they are ready.
  • Translated by its users. Volunteers translate the interface into their own languages on the new translation page.
  • Help when you need it. A new FAQ answers the most common questions, with step-by-step guides.

A new home for Living Tongues

You are reading this on the rebuilt livingtongues.org. Twenty years of news, projects, publications and field reports are all still here, now faster to load, easier to read on a phone, and searchable from the search page. Our team page and the bibliographies of our researchers link straight to dictionaries, papers and recordings.

Working with AI agents

Much of this year's progress came from a new way of working. Our developers now build Living Dictionaries alongside AI coding agents, which let a very small team ship far more than it could alone. Dictionary managers can use agents too: through the Living Dictionaries API, an agent can help import a spreadsheet of words, clean up entries or add translations, with the managers reviewing every change. In September alone, 35,900 entries were added to Living Dictionaries, about 31,000 of them through these agent-assisted imports.

Looking ahead

With the rest of the decade ahead of us, we are excited to keep building alongside the communities, linguists, students and partners who make Living Dictionaries what it is. If you would like to start a dictionary for your language, get started here, and if you would like to help this work continue, please consider supporting Living Tongues.

DictionariesDigital ResourcesLanguage Documentation