SpeakNigeriaOrg/yorubadict

Speak Nigeria's online Yoruba dictionary # Sọ̀rọ̀ Sókè — The People’s Yorùbá Dictionary A free, fast Yorùbá ↔ English dictionary, built from Wiktionary's data but designed the way a dictionary should work. It's a project of Speak Nigeria, the nonprofit behind free courses and resources for Nigerian heritage languages. ## Why this exists Wiktionary's raw data is one of the best resources anywhere for learning Yorùbá. That's not really about vocabulary — it's because Yorùbá habitually builds larger words out of smaller building-block words, and Wiktionary's etymology breakdowns capture that better than any other resource online. Understanding those building blocks isn't historical trivia; Yorùbá is a living language, and it's one of the things students in Speak Nigeria's own classes love most about it. It's fundamental to real fluency. The Wiktionary website itself, though, is genuinely hard to use for this. To find a word you have to type it a very specific way — no tone marks, but with underdots, and no other combination works. Any search surfaces results in every language Wiktionary covers, not just Yorùbá. And because it's crowdsourced, its etymology links are inconsistent — sometimes a parent word documents the words derived from it, sometimes only the derived word documents where it came from, sometimes both, sometimes neither, entirely depending on which page a contributor happened to edit. Tracing a family of related words means guessing which page has the link and searching for it by hand. Most dictionaries also make you pick a direction — Yorùbá-to-English or English-to-Yorùbá — instead of letting you search both at once. Sọ̀rọ̀ Sókè starts from the same underlying data (via Kaikki, which does its own cleanup pass on Wiktionary's raw wikitext) and fixes the rest: - **Search it the way you'd write it.** With or without tone marks, with or without underdots — every spelling of a Yorùbá word finds the same entry. - **Search both directions at once**, or lock to either Yorùbá-only or English-only …