The Organization of a Russian-English Stem Dictionary on Magnetic Tape

The organisation of a dictionary on magnetic tape is described. A single pass of the dictionary tape is sufficient to process a block of text words without reverse motion. Most Russian words are represented in all their inflected forms by a single entry in the dictionary. Even irregular nouns can usually be represented by two entries, but many verbs require two or three entries. The space occupied by an entry is very little greater than that required for a single inflected form. Mobile vowels are treated with very little extra space or complication of programme. The form of the entries is designed so that a simple technique for interpreting the inflections can be used. This is outlined at the end of the paper.