Free Online Tools for Latin Students
There are so many great tools for studying Latin which have been made available for free. These resources can help you with your grammar, vocabulary and reading skills. Every Latin student should have these bookmarked.
Whittaker’s words is a Latin dictionary and so much more. When you enter a Latin word into the search bar it returns all the options for what that word could be. In the example below, we asked it what “viri” was and it tells us the different words it could be: venom, virus, man, or strength. It also tell us for each of those words what case it would have to be in. Whittaker’s words in an invaluable tool for translating.
The Latin Dictionary is a fantastic tool for learning word endings. They have catalogued hundreds of Latin’s most common words and written out every single form of each of them. Simply go to index, find the word you want and enjoy being able to see the way that word changes according to case, gender, number, person, tense or mood! When you learn a new tense check your model verb’s forms on latin library to make sure you’re learning the pattern correctly.
This is just the first three tenses, all of the others forms of the verb are below including the imperative, gerund and participles.
Though particularly helpful for those following the Cambridge Latin Course textbooks, CLCO can be a great resource for all Latin students. Cambridge Latin Course has many interactive learning tools, the crown jewel of which is their reader. All of their stories are free to read, and selecting any word on the page will reveal level-appropriate information about that word. In Book 1, this usually just includes the translation or prepositional phrase, but in Book 5 the reader completely parses the word for you! The CLC stories are great and we recommend them even to Oxford Latin Course students who would like some extra practice.
Perseus is a repository of Ancient Latin and Greek texts set apart by its ability to display plenty of helpful information alongside the text. You can load translations, commentaries, the glossary and more. You can even click on a word in the text to be taken to the dictionary entry for it. While reading ancient texts is much harder than the modern Latin in many of our textbooks, reading the words of real Romans who lived 2000 years ago is a very rewarding endeavor. Perseus makes struggling through their complex grammar a little bit easier.
Are there more online tools that you use in your Latin study? We’ll be sharing more of our favourite websites in future posts so let us know if we missed any you love!