Mae govannen  ✦  well met

Every elvish word, traced back to where Tolkien wrote it

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137,144 words of Sindarin, Quenya, Telerin and the tongues around them — each one carrying the book, the page and the hand it came from.

Free  ✦  no account needed  ✦  open source since 2011

The first chapter

A book of sources, not a list of words

Tolkien revised his languages for fifty years and never felt he had finished them. Parf Edhellen gives you an unopinionated view into the words as they were recorded, including where and how they evolved throughout Tolkien's lifetime.

Every word carries its provenance

Source, publication, page, editor and the full history of revisions — down to the question marks the editors left standing.

Tulkas

tulkas

Phrases opened out, word by word

Real sentences from the legendarium, every word tagged with its inflection — so you watch the grammar working, not merely the translation.

Read the 84 phrases →

Kept by the people who read it

Fifteen years of corrections, arguments and additions from readers, linguists and translators. Everything reviewed, credited, and reversible.

49,436
glosses
5,326
discussions
1,559
thanks
49,185
searches a day

Fresh every week

Today in the book

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Phrase of the day

   ⸱     :

Lasto beth nîn, tolo dan nan galad.

Elrond heals Frodo in the Fellowship of the Ring movie, 2001.

Word by word

Read the whole phrase →

Pastimes

Learn by practice

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Weekly crossword

11 October

The latest Sindarin puzzle

A fresh grid every week, clued in English and answered in elvish. The whole year is there to work back through if you have missed a few.

Play this week's crossword

Also in Quenya

Word finder

Hunt words in the grid

Find hidden elvish words against the clock. Every word you catch links back to its entry.

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Flashcards & word lists

Gather your own vocabulary

Keep words as you read into lists of your own, then drill them. Readers here have finished 183,354 cards so far.

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Most recent community activity

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The colophon

Fifteen years of dedication

I have kept this book since 2011. Every gloss, every phrase and every line of the thing behind imported, transformed and organized by myself from various linguistic sources over the years.

The servers are the one thing evenings cannot pay for. If the book has been useful to you, a cup of tea is a kind way of saying so.

— Leonard, @parmaeldo

49,185 searches a day, and one person paying for the room they happen in.

Buy me a cup of tea

or give what costs nothing — correct a gloss · read the source

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