Discovering a Jewish Dictionary

A Hebrew or a Jewish dictionary is simply a dictionary which lists Hebrew words. The confusion comes in because a lot of people consider that Jewish and Hebrew are synonamous with each other. In fact, it is only with the introduction of the internet that the term Jewish Dictionary has come into use at all.

Therefore, although I am using Jewish dictionary for the purpose of this article, I am also including Hebrew dictionary. This hopefully will cover many of the bases which are needed.

It may be argued, that a Jewish dictionary not only contains Hebrew words, but also contains any other words which are associated with Judaism or even Yiddish words as well. This arguement actually works fairly well, although it is likely that a true Hebrew dictionary would contain many of them also. The best thing that you can do is to check the dictionary that you are using to see what it says.

Finding a dictionary online which translates English words into Hebrew is not such a difficult thing. However, the difficulty arises when you are trying to translate from Hebrew into English. This is because Hebrew uses a different font typeface and it is actually extremely difficult from a programming point of view to do so. There are a few though, and if you do a search on Google then you are bound to find one. My favorite one unfortunately is a dictionary which I use in the offline world which has not so far made it to be an online Jewish dictionary.

My last piece of advice that I would give you when trying to find a decent Hebrew translation of a word is to ensure that you translate from English to Hebrew and then translate that word back again from Hebrew to English. In that way you will be sure that you are not actually using the wrong word which can lead to embaressment!