About the "Italian Supplement" for Excalibur. The "Italian Supplement" spelling dictionary contains 184,000 Italian words and occupies 1.6 Mb on the hard drive. It isn't useful on its own because it doesn't contain basic vocabulary. However it can be used to supplement the 62,000 words in the "Italian Dictionary" provided by Paolo Matteucci. The two together give Excalibur access to a total of 246,000 Italian words. The "Italian Supplement" is not 100% accurate. Users who need maximum accuracy should stick to using just Paolo Matteucci's "Italian Dictionary". However people who need the extra words will find the "Italian Supplement" useful in spite of its having some defects. Installing the "Italian Supplement" for use with Excalibur. Put the "Italian Supplement" into the folder in which you keep Excalibur. If you prefer to store it somewhere else, put an alias for it into the folder in which you keep Excalibur. On Excalibur's Dictionary menu, choose Open Dictionary.... Navigate to find the "Italian Supplement', select it, and click Open. If you want the "Italian Supplement" to be opened automatically when you launch Excalibur in future, choose Preferences.... from the Options menu. In the Preferences window, check the box called Load currently active dictionaries. Click Save Now. About this revision. The "Italian Supplement" is a reduced and partly-revised version of a larger list of about 277,000 words which has been available at the Excalibur site since early in 1997. There were some problems with that very large list. - It didn't contain any accents. Words that ought to be written with an accent appeared in their unaccented form. The list has been searched for words that ought to have an accent, and so far as possible the accented form has been substituted. It wasn't practicable to search for every word that ought to bear an accent. Almost all the accented parts of the future tense have been corrected, and almost all words that should end in -t\`a. Some accented parts of the passato remoto tense have been corrected or added. Other words have been corrected if they were found, but the result is patchy. - There were too many non-Italian words. Modern Italian is adopting lots of non-Italian words, especially in the fields of sport, popular music, and information technology. However the list looked as if it included almost every foreign word that the original compiler had come across, and the result seemed excessive. The list was searched for words containing j, k, w, x, or y, and for words ending with u or with a consonant. Some of them are genuine Italian words, or words that have become a recognised part of modern Italian. Most of the "good words" have been left as they were, but many foreign intruders have been deleted. It wasn't practicable to search for every non-Italian word. The list wasn't searched for foreign words ending in a, e, i or o, so the "Italian Supplement" probably still contains some non-Italian words. - There were too many words starting with A and B. This resulted from the previous merger of two separate word lists. One of those lists covered the whole alphabet and contained 245,000 words; the other covered only the letters A and B and contained 32,000 additional words. Most of the 32,000 extra "A-B" words have been removed from the "Italian Supplement". They are available as a separate collection. If you want them, look for "Italian A-B words" on the Excalibur site. - It contained numerous words that were already included in Paolo Matteucci's "Italian Dictionary". These words have been deleted from the "Italian Supplement". Hyphenated words and Roman numerals have been deleted. A few spelling mistakes were found and corrected, but the list didn't seem to contain many mistakes. The main reference work used was Il Grande Dizionario Garzanti. The accents are generally as shown in that work. It is nice to have the opportunity to express appreciation to Rick Zaccone and Rob Gottshall for the indispensable program Excalibur, to Paolo Matteucci whose "Italian Dictionary" for Excalibur is invaluable in so many ways, not least in helping with this revision of the "Italian Supplement" list, and especially to Jacek Iwanski. His shareware program "Verbs & Nouns Lookup" handles bilingual dictionaries and verb tables, does word-for-word translation, and is a spellchecker too. A recent innovation in that program has made it practicable to remove defective and surplus words from the "Italian Supplement". If you'd like more information about his software, visit his home page at , or write to him at , or to me (see below). An English-to-Italian translation module is expected to become available in the near future. Anyone who wants to revise the "Italian Supplement" further is welcome to do so. Adrienne Forbes email: dandaforbes@netmatters.co.uk September 1998