Jastrow search

I’m a big user (and fan of ) Sefaria.org, the online library of Jewish texts. It’s become especially valuable lately as the commentaries on each text seem to proliferate on the platform. See, for example, the number of commentaries on Esther 1:1:

One of the best things about the site lately is the impressive list of reference works Sefaria has managed to compile. There are quite a few (aside from Jastrow), but here are some of my favorites:

• Sefer HaShorashim
• Sefer HeArukh
• Otzar La’azei Rashi
• BDB
• Machberet Menachem

While I think it would be valuable to search through any (or all) of these, I am most interested in Jastrow. It’s somewhat of a pain to search within a particular dictionary on the website, so I created a web application that uses the Sefaria API to search the Jastrow dictionary. You can check out the application at katzir.xyz/jastrow.

There’s are a variety of endpoints on the Sefaria developer site that are worth exploring, but the one I used for this is under the lexicon menu. The specific call is:

  SEFARIA_API_BASE = "https://www.sefaria.org/api/words"

Basically the application accepts a word in search, limits the reference parameter to Jastrow, and lists the corresponding definitions. The application is built on Sinatra, and the views are designed display definition details, citations, and other information.

While I’ve mostly used the application on my phone while learning Talmud (I have a Hebrew keyboard on mobile), I did create a floating keyboard for the desktop site, an idea I got from the Yiddish Book Center’s keyboard.

Anyway, check it out:

Here’s the definition view:

Eventually I’ll create a page for Jastrow’s preface as well as a list of acronyms and abbreviations from the dictionary.