Luggat

Luggat is an Ottoman Turkish–Turkish dictionary covering more than 206,000 words. You can look a word up in its Turkish or Ottoman spelling and see a detailed definition and its Ottoman script. It is for people learning to read Ottoman Turkish, people working with historical texts, and anyone curious about where words come from.

When you get stuck on a word in an Ottoman text, the answer usually means a heavy printed dictionary or a trail of scattered sources. Luggat brings that knowledge together in one searchable place and, alongside a word's meaning, aims to show in which period and works it was used, and how. Seeing how a word sits in a sentence and where it comes from makes it easier to remember. That is why we designed Luggat as a learning tool, not a list of words.

The dictionary rests on word entries and user content: users add notes, comments and their own experience, so each entry grows richer over time. On top of that, AI helps with two things:

• Example sentences: AI generates period-appropriate example sentences for each word.
• Etymology reports: AI-assisted reports explain a word's origin, its historical development and its use in Ottoman literature.

These features are unlocked with a student membership. The dictionary also sends a weekly Ottoman Turkish newsletter with new words, quotations from literature and learning tips.

Luggat grew from zero, organically, on a user-generated content model, reaching more than 600,000 page views a month within two years. The growth came not from advertising but from user content and word pages found through search. The dictionary is live: luggat.com.