Lexical Resources

General lexical resources
Ġabra: An Open Lexicon for Maltese

A Maltese-English full-form lexicon, grouping entries by lemma and morphological root, with English glosses and inflectional forms.
Ġabra also provides a web service api for querying and lemmatisation, for developers. The database is downloadable.

Further info

Ġabra was originally built by John J. Camilleri as an opportunistic collection, partly based on automatically generated wordforms and partly on other resources. Since 2015, it has undergone substantial redevelopment as part of the Dizzjunarju tal-Malti project, with the help of Maria Theresa Abdilla and John Paul Grima, and the collaboration and support of National Council for the Maltese Language, the Malta Communications Authority, the Vodafone Foundation, and Infusion Ltd.

Sign Language
Dictionary of Maltese Sign Language

A multimodal dictionary of Maltese Sign Language.

Further info

This dictionary is edited by Marie Alexander and Maria Galea. It is is the outcome of a long-term project investigating Maltese Sign Language within the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology, University of Malta. It involved extensive collaboration with the Deaf Community in Malta.

Historical lexicons
Under development
Ġabra tal-Malti Qadim

A lexicon of historical Maltese, consisting of Maltese lexical items culled from historical (16th to 19th Century) sources, mapped to lemmas in contemporary Maltese, with examples of usage in context from the original documents.
Further info

The Ġabra tal-Malti Qadim is the result of a collaboration with the Department of Maltese, under the direction of Olvin Vella and a team of student researchers.

Other resources
file (xls)
Maltese verbal roots

This is an exhaustive database of roots and verbal patterns in Maltese, which was compiled by Michael Spagnol using Serracino-Inglott’s (1975-1989) monolingual dictionary, Aquilina’s (1987-1990) bilingual dictionary, and Mifsud’s (1995, Loan Verbs in Maltese. NY: Brill, pp. 272-295) list of loan verbs that have been fully integrated into the root-and-pattern system of Maltese.

 file (xls)
Maltese broken plurals

This is a large corpus of broken plurals in Maltese, put together by Michael Spagnol with the help of Thomas Mayer and Florian Schönhuber. The corpus, which contains 654 singular-broken plural pairs, is mainly based on Tamara Schembri’s 2012 (The broken plural in Maltese – A description. Bochum: Brockmeyer) list of synchronically used or known broken plurals with some minor additions. While dictionaries list over 2,000 broken plural forms (cf. Cardona's 1996 Il-Morfoloġija tal-Plural fil-Malti., M.A. dissertation, University of Malta), we base our study on a comprehensive inventory of broken plural forms which, roughly speaking, an educated speaker of Maltese has.