The English-Amharic-English (eAe) Abridged Dictionary has 2000 words and phrases, more than 200 dialogue entries. The translation language direction can be English to Amharic or the other way round. This preference can be set by clicking the “Set Language Direction Choice” button at the home page of the dictionary.
The words and phrases in the dictionary are organized in two sets of categories. The category groupings are Grammatical Usage categories and Words Context categories. These category sets are identified based on their importance to the ease of learning the words and phrases in the dictionary.
In the Grammatical Usage grouping, there are 13 categories; whereas, in the Words Context grouping there are 33 categories. Each word or phrase belongs to one Grammatical Usage grouping and one Word Context grouping. In the words and phrases database, there are, among others, 337 verbs, 1276 nouns, 18 pronouns, 45 adverbs and 179 adjectives.
These categories are meant to assist the user's learning process by providing multiple ways of creating word association and memorization. As a complement to the words and phrases, simple and context-based dialogues are included to help practice Amharic speaking. The dialogues are organized into 10 top level context categories and many sub-categories.
The dictionary is also searchable by alphabet letter, word or phrase. The search function gives options of specifying the search target, i.e. weather to search words and phrases database or dialogues/conversations database.
As a very crucial foundation of the dictionary usage and words reading, the dictionary includes Ethiopic/Amharic letters with audio on how the sounds represented by the symbols are read. The Ethiopic characters include both regular and irregular types and all letters commonly used in Amharic are included.
Based on the Amharic letters representation (symbol, audio and English letters encoding), Amharic text is supplied for each of the 2000 words and phrases in the dictionary. Also, to make the initial reading easier, a simplified reading of Amharic words is supplied as translation of English words and phrases. The details of a selected word or phrase in the dictionary includes its grammatical and context grouping so that meaning understanding, learning, remembering and creating associations are accomplished easily and effectively.
This dictionary is very valuable to travelers, Ethiopian kids adopted parents, Ethiopian kids that grew abroad, non-Amharic speakers that interact/like to interact with Ethiopian friends, colleagues or long distance pals.
