Method

Where words come from

Three kinds of source, kept apart on every entry. Linguistic research: fieldwork published in journals and theses, read in the original and cited by page. Historical record: words written down by a witness at the time, such as the glossary George Seferis kept in Pretoria in 1942. Community: words sent in by readers, checked by an editor and published with the contributor's name. Press lists and reference sites are used only where nothing better exists, and are marked as such.

Editorial standards

• Provenance. Every entry names its sources. To Booko lists every source in full on its Sources page. The Italian dictionary shows the full reference and the page on each entry. The Spanish dictionary names and links each source but does not yet give page numbers; that is part of its beta. Where a page has not been checked, the entry says so.
• No invented forms. Where a researcher printed a word only in Latin letters, we do not manufacture a spelling in the mother tongue's script without saying so. Where we have supplied one, the entry says "spelling ours" and shows the form as recorded.
• No merging of communities. A word heard in both Melbourne and Chicago appears under both flags and says so. The differences between the communities are part of the record.
• Exclusions. Words that are standard in the mother tongue today, however English their origin, are left out. So are slurs.
• Attribution and consent. Community contributors are published under the name they give and nothing else. Email addresses are kept private and used only to ask a question about the word. A contributor can withdraw a word at any time.
• Correction. Anyone can report an error, and corrections are made on the entry. A disputed mark, a public record of changes and public data downloads are planned and not yet built.
• Versioning. To Booko's data is exported nightly into version control. The Italian and Spanish dictionaries are versioned with every change to the site. Any state of them can be recovered.
• Reuse. The dictionaries are free to read and cite. The licence for bulk reuse of the data will be settled with the advisory panel before the first beta closes; our proposal is Creative Commons Attribution.

Phrases

Whole expressions are kept in a section of their own: greetings worn down from English, idioms translated word for word, and the mother tongue's verbs carrying an English word unchanged. They behave differently from nouns, have no gender or plural, and are mostly the second generation talking.

Community additions

Anyone can add a word. It goes to the editors, who check it against the sources, settle the spelling with the contributor if needed, and publish it with the contributor's name and the place they heard it. In To Booko, comments on published words are read before they appear, and readers can mark where they heard a word. The Italian and Spanish dictionaries will add both.

Citing

To Booko has a Sources page listing every reference in full with the number of words it supports. The Italian and Spanish dictionaries give their references on each entry. To cite the project as a whole: Gold, Kyriakos (ed.) (2026). Ethnolects: dictionaries of the languages migrants made. Melbourne. https://ethnolects.org