Writing
Latin to English Translator
Enter a common Latin word or short phrase. The tool first tries an exact-phrase match, then falls back to a word-by-word English lookup using a built-in Latin-to-English dictionary.
Common Latin words and phrases only. The lookup matches whole phrases first, then falls back to word-by-word matches.
Try a sample
English (dictionary phrase)
hello / hi
Exact match for "salve".
Exact phrase matches return the standard English meaning. Word-by-word matches return one English meaning per Latin word (or several slash-separated meanings when the word is polysemous).
Examples
salve
hello (greeting)
te amo
I love you
veni vidi vici
I came, I saw, I conquered
pax veritas lux
peace truth light (word-by-word)
amor vincit omnia
love conquers all
How it works
The lookup is purely dictionary-based and runs entirely in your browser. There are no API calls and no external dependencies.
Phrase match · normalize input, look up exact phrase
Word match · tokenize, look up each word, join with original spaces and punctuation
When a single Latin word has multiple English meanings, the result panel lists them slash-separated.
Related writing tools
- English to Latin translator for the reverse lookup.
- Word counter for word and character counts on any text.
- Character counter for tight length checks.
- All writing tools.
Limitation note. This is a dictionary lookup, not a full Latin reader. Real Latin translation requires morphological parsing and grammatical context that this tool does not provide.
Frequently asked questions
No. Latin is heavily inflected: a single root can show up as dozens of surface forms depending on case, number, person, tense, and voice. A real Latin reader parses the morphology of each word. The tool here recognizes citation forms (the dictionary entry) only.
The tool first tries an exact phrase match against a built-in dictionary of well-known Latin phrases (carpe diem, veni vidi vici, et cetera). If no phrase matches, it splits your input into words and looks each one up in a small Latin-to-English dictionary. Tokens that are not in the dictionary appear in [brackets?].
Polysemy. Many Latin words map to several related English meanings; for example terra means both 'earth' and 'land', and via means both 'road' and 'way'. The result panel shows the alternatives slash-separated so you can pick the one that fits your context.
The dictionary holds citation forms (the 1st-person-present for verbs, nominative-singular for nouns). Inflected forms will not match unless they happen to be identical to the citation form. For inflected Latin, use a morphological analyzer like Whitaker's Words or a parsing dictionary.
Standard intros include Wheelock's Latin and Lingua Latina per se Illustrata (Hans Ørberg). For reference, the Oxford Latin Dictionary and Lewis & Short are the standard scholarly dictionaries; Wiktionary's Latin entries are surprisingly thorough and free.
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