Overview and Online Sources
The gematria database available on this site was built from scratch and combines various other online sources of content into a single place for your benefit.
I started with a Hebrew dictionary spell-checker file that contained about 500k Hebrew words. I hit online dictionaries and begin building translations for as many words as could be found, and calculated the gematria for each word and stored those values. Next, I went to some other online gematria dictionaries and biblical study sites and grabbed words and definitions from them and calculated the gematria again. It should be noted that my database contains two gematria values per word, one that includes the final (sofit) letter values, and one that ignores these. For more information about the algorithms and approach used by the tools provided by Esoteric Delights, please read this.
I mostly used the following sources to build the database that you find here:
- Obout Editor: This is an open source .NET spellchecker utility that has a number of dictionaries in multiple languages available. The core dictionary used by this site is built around words stored in this spellchecker's "he-IL.dic zip" dictionary file (of about 500,000 words in this dictionary, I was able to find translations for a little over half of them).
- Babylon Website: This comprehensive and bi-directional online Hebrew dictionary contains words, phrases, abbreviations & acronyms. I used this site to get translations of words in the aforementioned spellchecker dictionary.
- Milon: Milon is a free online English Hebrew English dictionary. Note: From what I can tell, it has exactly the same content as Babylon. I'm not sure if it's secretly the same service or if this site scraped Babylon in its entirety.
- Bible Wheel: Full Text Hebrew/Greek Bible Gematria Database. I used this site to get more translations and new words by searching on numerical (gematria) values to expand the core database.
- Rodurago Cypheron: "The Caballah dictionary at hand I have compiled using various Hebrew dictionaries (both ancient Hebrew and modern Hebrew / Ivrit). I have put special emphasis on the gematry (Gematria, hebr. גימטריה, griech. γεωμετρια) of the Hebrew alphabet." This was by far the best online esoteric Qabala/Gematria dictionary I was able to find in my web travels - please check out his site, there's lots of cool stuff there! I also used this site to get more translations with a more esoteric flavor to expand the core database.
Disclaimer
Two things of key importance to note: 1) I do not speak Hebrew and 2) I relied on 3rd parties mentioned above to construct the master database used by this site.
I cannot guarantee that the contents of the database are 100% accurate, especially any of the translations/words that did not come "officially" from a dictionary file or website. The Bible Wheel and Rodurago Cypheron data has not been verified, and there is a greater chance that I had some data entry issues in scraping those sites (in fact, I know that I had some problems with some numbers on the Bible Wheel site).
As I indicate below in the Database Road Map section, I plan on eventually altering the search results from the database to let you know the original source of a translation and allow you to target your searches by source. If you find any errata in the database and care to let me know, I will correct it. Feel free to contact me here.
Database Road Map
Here are things that I plan on doing with this database in the short and medium term:
- Updating the database functionality over the coming months to allow different ways to search and filter the data and implement some Ajax-based interface elements to reduce the amount of postbacks and generally optimize the interface.
- Allow you to see more details about the database entries for any given word/translation pair so that you can see the source and link to the original wherever possible.
- Creating a user and community-driven data management tool into it so that you can suggest changes and additions to the database.
- Provide Web services to allow developers to programmatically access the data and manipulate as they see fit.
Other suggestions and feedback are welcome! Contact me here.