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Making sense of old handwriting

Dictionaries


Even if you are already familiar with the Portuguese language in a modern sense, in reading historical documents you will find a lot of archaic language and unfamiliar vocabulary. In addition to that, meanings of words can shift over time to be entirely different than their historic meanings. To this purpose, attached are a few dictionaries that you will find useful in finding historic or modern meanings of the vocabulary you encounter.

This is a good modern dictionary for modern Portuguese but also lists historical meanings of words: Infopédia. Dicionário Porto Editora. https://www.infopedia.pt/

This is the first monolingual dictionary of the language, written in the early 1700s: Bluteau, Rafael. Diccionario da lingua portugueza composto pelo padre D. Rafael Bluteau. https://archive.org/details/diccionariodalin00mora/page/n3/mode/2up

The first Portuguese English dictionary from the mid 1700s: Vieyra, Antonio. A dictionary of the Portuguese and English languages, in two parts: Portuguese and English and English and Portuguese. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_MTZAAAAAYAAJ/page/n1/mode/2up


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