TTT:Why?

Q. Why a new dictionary, when good public-domain dictionaries like Lewis and Short (Latin-English) and Smith and Hall (English-Latin) are available online?

A. The existing sources are of course excellent. The dictionaries at TTT, however, have a few slightly different aims:

• First, attempting to overcome the divide between the English of the 19th century and the 21st century. Anyone who has worked long with public-domain dictionaries of English (such as Webster 1913) knows that our language has changed a lot in the past hundred years: words gain new senses and lose old ones; primary meanings change. The old bilingual dictionaries, then, which tend to stick to brief or one-word glosses, can mislead the user into associating the wrong Latin word with the wrong English idea. So the goal is to give modern glosses in short entries and give full definitions in expanded entries.
• Second, to examine the corpus as a whole for its usage of a word, not merely exceptional instances. The ‘constructions’ section is intended to gather collocations of words that appear more than once, indicating they are either usual or proverbial constructs in the language. The goal is to emphasize normal usage of Latin words so as to learn how best to use and understand them today.
• Third, to cover post-Roman Latin, especially words for modern and medieval concepts.

There are a few other goals I'd like to see, but these are the chief ones for now.

Q. Why isn't this wiki open for anyone to edit?

A. The aim of restricted editing is to present a consistency of quality (such as there is) and format. If you've noticed something that needs to be corrected, improved, or otherwise looked into, the talk (or "discussion") pages are publicly editable, and constructive criticism is much appreciated. If you really want a public wiki-based dictionary, though, you can go to Wiktionary, a sister project of Wikipedia; they even have a version entirely in Latin.

I don't plan on producing a colossal dictionary of the language alone. However, I have not yet decided on what basis to allow other editors.