The Lao Wordlist

LaoScript 8 includes a dictionary of about 16,000 commonly used Lao words to enable spell-checking of Lao text and dictionary-based text wrapping. For short documents, text-wrapping at syllable boundaries (implemented automatically during text input) is usually good enough, but dictionary-based wrapping prevents longer words and loan words from being split incorrectly, improving document appearance and making easier reading.

Users may add to the dictionary, either directly from the Lao Word List... entry in the LaoScript 8 taskbar menu, or during spelling checking with the Lao Add-In for MS Word.

For each dictionary entry, you may specify if (and how) the word should be wrapped (or hyphenated) at line boundaries. You can also control how the word should appear in an alphabetically-ordered list of Lao words, which can be helpful for loan words and other exception to normal Lao spelling conventions.

To open and use the word list, select Lao Word List... from the LaoScript 8 taskbar menu:

To see listed words, type the first few letters of the word in the input area of the drop-down list:

To add a new word, type it into the drop-down list, then press Add.

To delete a user-added word entry, select it in the list, then press Delete. (Words in the originally provided "master" dictionary list cannot be deleted by the user.)

Use the Properties... button to view or modify the various properties of a listed or added Lao word:

Lao words which start with a prefix vowel followed by a consonant pair such as ຫງ can sometimes be pronounced in two different ways, with different dictionary positions according to the pronunciation. An example is ໂຫງ, which could be either [ngoo] or [hoong]. This ambiguity generally only affects sorting and romanization, and is resolved by inserting a space (which will appear as a centred dot) before the final in the "Sort as" textbox, to indicate that the consonant is syllable-final, and not part of an initial "digraph" consonant. This is illustrated in the following example:

Alternate spellings

When a word is added to the word list, if it contains any of the Lao ligature consonants ຫຼ, ໝ or ໜ, then the same word will be added again, but replacing those letters with the (commonly used) digraph forms ຫລ, ຫມ or ຫນ. The digraph form of each word will be marked as "Alternate", and will be ordered alphabetically exactly as the ligature form of the same word.