- LEO (website)
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LEO GmbH 
Type GmbH Founded 3 April 2006 Headquarters Sauerlach, Germany Revenue ? Employees 16 Website leo.org Alexa rank ~700 Type of site Online dictionaries Advertising Google AdSense, image banners & buttons Registration optional Available in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Russian Launched 5 June 1994 Current status active LEO (meaning Link Everything Online) is an Internet based electronic dictionary and translation dictionary initiated by the computer science department of the Technische Universität München (Technical University of Munich) in Germany. After a spin out, the dictionaries have been run since 3 April 2006 by the limited liability company Leo GmbH, formed by the members of the original Leo team, and is partially funded by commercial advertising on the website. Its dictionaries can be consulted free online from any web browser or from LEO's Lion downloadable user interface (GUI) which is free since version 3.0 (released 13 January 2009) to private users only and no longer sold as shareware. Corporate users and research institutions are however required to purchase a licence.
Contents
Dictionaries
The website hosts five free German language based bilingual dictionaries and fora for additional language queries. The dictionaries are characterized by providing translations in forms of hyperlinks to further dictionary queries, thereby facilitating back translations. The dictionaries are partly added to and corrected by large vocabulary donations of individuals or companies, partly through suggestions and discussions on the LEO language fora.
Due to its open collaborative nature, many entries are added without lexical supervision, creating in some instances, duplication and a lack of additional lexical information such as gender, inflected and irregular forms, plurals, and other contextual indicators. In many cases however, extensive references to the translations are provided in the form of example phrases of language in use.
English–German
The English-German dictionary run by Leo since 1995 contains about 660,000 entries and receives an average of 12 million queries per weekday.[1]
French–German
In 2004, a French–German dictionary was added to the site's services and has about 202,000 entries. This gets about 2 million queries each weekday.[2]
Spanish–German
A Spanish–German dictionary with about 157,000 entries was introduced on 3 April 2006. It gets about 1.2 million queries each weekday.[3]
Italian–German
An Italian-German was started on 3 April 2008. At the time of the public launch, the dictionary contained about 140,000 entries and received 77,000 queries on the first day.[4] Today it contains about 141,000 entries and receives an average of 500,000 queries each weekday.
Chinese–German
The Chinese–German dictionary was started on the same date as the Italian–German dictionary, 3 April 2008. Queries can be entered by using Pinyin, or traditional or simplified characters.[5] The dictionary started with about 65,000 entries and received about 93,000 queries on the first day.[6] Today it contains about 132,000 entries and receives an average of 75,000 queries each weekday. Due to text encoding limitations, the Chinese dictionary cannot be used in the Lion software interface.
Russian–German
On 18 February 2009, LEO announced[7] a forthcoming release of a German–Russian dictionary. The starter database has been provided in collaboration with ABBY Europe GmbH, the producers of the Lingvo dictionary brand.
The new dictionary became publicly available on 12 April 2010 after a couple of testing days. It started with 77,934 entries and received 38,800 queries on 13 April 2010. As the dictionary only went online in the evening it only received 3,607 queries on its first day.[8]
Today it contains about 80,000 entries and receives an average of 33,000 queries each weekday.[9]
History
The site grew out of a network of FTP software and archived data which was put together by students at Munich University of Technology and Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich even before HTML and HTTP existed. The original aim was to create a single, huge archive by linking up archives run by the different research groups (hence its name LEO – Link Everything Online. The archive was sorted thematically and the different sections organised and kept up to date by archivists.
When the World Wide Web came into common use, HTTP access to the archive was at first added as an alternative to FTP. Students developed various services in their free time, in particular the dictionaries. Some services have been dropped in the course of the spin out, such as the software archive.
Name
The name of the site is actually a backronym from the name Leo: the Bavarian coat of arms features a lion. Originally, the service was named ISAR (a backronym for Isar river, on the banks of which Munich is situated; here, ISAR stood for Informations Systeme und Archiv München, but it had to be renamed as there was another firm of the same name.
References
- ^ English-German Query Statistics of dict.leo.org
- ^ French–German Query Statistics of dict.leo.org
- ^ Spanish–German Query Statistics of dict.leo.org
- ^ Italian–German Query Statistics of dict.leo.org
- ^ Usage tips for the Chinese–German Dictionary (in German)
- ^ Chinese-German Query Statistics of dict.leo.org
- ^ http://dict.leo.org/pages.ende/impressum_en.html?lang=en Press release recovered May 12, 2009
- ^ http://dict.leo.org/pages.rude/stat_de.html?lp=rude&lang=de
- ^ Russian-German Query Statistics of dict.leo.org
- Some of this article was translated from the German language version of this page.
External links
- LEO's entry page (in German)
- The dictionary (in German)
- The dictionary (in English)
Categories:- German websites
- Online dictionaries
- German dictionaries
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