International Union of Speleology
Informatics Commission - Dictionary Sub-commission

The UIS Caver's Multi-lingual Dictionary
Updates History

Below is listed the progress of the Dictionary since its first web edition in 1998. This web version of Attila KÓSA's 1995/6 hardcopy publication, The Caver's Living Dictionary, was originated and is maintained by the the Dictionary Sub-commission of the UIS Informatics Commission (UISIC). Since the publication of our associated UIS Cave and Karst Glossary this history also includes the Glossary updates.

2023-05-07:

• Updated Dictionary Introduction to show more early history.

2023-04-30 Dictionary Edition 21:

• Added links from the English terms of the Dictionary's Concepts to their definition in new UIS Cave and Karst Glossary.
• Added a new page with the Concepts grouped according to their speleological subject.
• On the Dictionary Introduction page:
  • Added a new section about the links to the Glossary.
  • Added information about the Dictionary's early history.
  • Added more information about the Sub-commission's management
  • General updating of the page including menus and contact details.
  • Restored broken link for Garry Smith's Glossary of Caving Terms (Aug 1998), and his Extra colloquial terms.
  • Relocated three of Glenn Baddeley's PDFs to the UISIC site after their host site was lost:
    Joe Jennings' (extended) Cave and Karst Terminology - Glenn Baddeley's version.
    Max Meth's Glossary of Speleological and Caving Terms 1998.
    Ken Grimes' Glossary - Some Volcanic, Cave and Karst Terms 1995.
• Updates to Dictionary Concepts (prompted by Glossary entries):
  • Concept 127 en: Corrected spelling of 'intermittant' to 'intermittent'.
  • Concept 136 en: Added 'flute (US)'.
  • Concept 273 en: Added 'guide-rope'.
• Updated the page for "Sending a whole new language".
• Updated this Dictionary History page to also include Glossary history.
• Updated the Glossary page and Glossary Project page to reflect that the Dictionary concepts are now linked to the Glossary definitions. Also updated the web link for Glossary Reference 23.

2023-04-14 Glossary Stage 1 Edition:

• Published Stage 1 of the UIS Glossary. This pass created a usable version of the Glossary, eliminated the data glitches, restored sub- and super-scripts to formulas, and established permanent addressable ID numbers for the Glossary terms. Several scientific equations are still expressed in plain-text format, but their proper formatting will be restored in the next stage. Apart from a few typos, in this initial stage the term definitions have not been added to nor changed from the original Field 2002 publication.

2022-11-30 Glossary Preliminary Draft Edition:

• Published a very preliminary draft of the new UIS Cave and Karst Glossary. To get the Glossary off the ground we started with an existing professional PDF glossary of 2700 terms with the help of the author: Field, M. Second Edition 2002 A Lexicon of Cave and Karst Terminology with Special Reference to Environmental Karst Hydrology. This preliminary draft included only temporary Term ID numbers, the loss of subscripts and superscripts in chemical and mineral formulas, and three data glitches in the conversion to the web page.

2022-11-09 Edition 20.1:

• Simplified the sub-commission's name to just "Dictionary Sub-commission".

2022-11-07 Glossary:

• Web page of Glossary Project published. This page details the rationale, plans and progress of the project.
• Created a forum for the project to assist participation by interested speleos, and to list progress and any help the project needed.

2022-10-18 Glossary:

Glossary Project work started:

• Peter Matthews contacted Malcolm Field, author of our initial starting-point glossary, who was happy to help and provided a copy of his WordPerfect original. Peter then removed its columns and exported its contents to a text file in Unicode UTF-16 format.
• Mike Lake cleaned up this text file, converted it to Unicode UTF-8, and parsed it to an initial web page format.
• Mike created a github Repository to hold all files associated with the project.

2022-10-02 Edition 20:

• Added Slovak language, supplied by Lukáš VLČEK of Slovakia.
• Corrected 'Bahasa Indonesian' to 'Bahasa Indonesia'.
• Fixed obsolete links to email addresses.
• Added a link to the Glossary project.
• Restored broken links in Bibliography (Field 2002, Jennings 1979, Monroe 1970, Trimmel 1965, ).
• Restored broken links in Web Links (Field 2002, FFS-EFS Lexique - now lost, Jennings 1979, KÁZMÉR 2005, Trimmel 1965).

2019-01-06 Edition 19.1:
Updates only to our lists of other glossaries:

• Restored broken link to Peter Ackroyd's hyperlinked glossary, whose original website had shut down.
• Added link to KÁZMÉR Miklós' English-Hungarian Geological Dictionary.
• Added link to ASF's official 1996 extended version of Joe Jennings' Cave and Karst Terminology
• Added link to Watson Monroe's 1970 A Glossary of Karst Terminology
• Added Hubert Trimmel's 1965 Speläologisches Fachwörterbuch/Speleological Dictionary to Bibliography, Web links.
• Added Paul Fénelon's 1968 Vocabulaire français des phénomènes karstiques to Bibliography.
• Added Carol Hill's and Paolo Forti's 1997 Minerals Glossary in Cave Minerals of the World to Bibliography.

2019-01-03 Edition 19:

• Added Pinyin to Chinese terms, supplied by Qingqing LI of China. This assists with pronunciation.
• Restored broken links to several other speleo glossary documents, whose original website had shut down.

2018-11-22 Edition 18:

• Added Chinese(Simplified) terms, supplied by Qingqing LI of China.
• Added extra Ukrainian term to Concept 69 (Bat) supplied in Nov 2016 by Mykyta KOZLOV of Ukraine.
• Updated various broken links to other speleo glossary documents.
• Added Serbian Helper 2009, Ana MLADENOVIĆ.
• Added Creative Commons Licence to clarify sharing arrangements, licence type " Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International" (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

2017-07-11 Edition 17:
Added:

• Added Arabic terms, supplied by many members of the Speleo Club du Liban, Lebanon.
• Added Turkish terms, supplied by the OBRUK Cave Research Group, Turkey.
• Updated various external links.

2016-02-20 Edition 16.3:
Added:

• Added a French term to Concept 87. Update supplied by Jean-Pierre Bartholeyns

2015-03-12 Edition 16.2:
Updated:

• Corrected typos in French in Concept 336. Update supplied by David Blanchard.

2014-04-19 Edition 16.1:
Updated:

• Link to Garry Smith's Glossary of Caving Terms. Update supplied by Garry Smith.

2014-03-20 Edition 16:
Added:

• Ukrainian and Russian terms by by Viacheslav ANDREYCHOUK (Poland & Ukraine), with some assistance from Alexander KLIMCHOUK of Ukraine and Wiesława Ewa KRAWCZYK of Poland.

2013-07-22 Edition 15:
Added:

• Polish terms by by Wiesława Ewa KRAWCZYK of Poland with some assistance from Derek FORD (Canada) and Slava ANDREICHUK (Poland).
• New Reference: ROGLIĆ, 1974.

2013-06-19 Edition 14:
Added:

• Greek terms by Isidoros KAMPOLIS and Thomas THEODOSIADIS, both from Greece.
• Japanese terms by Ayumi OKOUCHI, assisted by Kakuteru YOKOTA, Kensaku URATA, Naofumi ITODA, Norihiko ISHIKAWA, and Satoshi GOTO, all from Japan.
• Korean terms by WOO Kyung Sik from Korea.
• A web link to the 13-language multi-lingual glossary spreadsheet of the French School of Speleology (École Française de Spéléologie) of FFS.

• Concepts 343 and 344: added Lithuanian (Erikas LAICONAS) and Romanian (Bogdan ONAC).
• Farsi/Persian: The following concepts updated by Saeed HASHEMINEZHAD of Iran: 20, 34, 35, 45, 75, 121, 133, 137, 185, 188, 208, 212, 216, 343, and 344.
• Spanish: The following concepts updated by Carlos Goicoechea CARRANZA of Costa Rica, many of them previously missing: 47, 56, 82, 91, 125, 171, 175, 202, 213, 222, 234, 243, 259, 260, 288, 293, 310, 311, 312, 332, 337, 341, 342, and 343.
• The page describing how to send a whole new language and its associated template spreadsheet (now Rev.5) have been updated to also cover how to send updates and corrections as well as whole new languages.
• General updating or removal of broken links in the Glossary Links section.
• Fixed broken link on Jennings (1979) reference.
• The Updates list was shortened to just recent updates, and the full history moved off to a separate page.

2013-03-16 Edition 13:
Added:

• Latin terms by Arrigo CIGNA, from Italy, who also suggested some corrections to other languages.
• Slovenian terms by Andrej MIHEVC, from Slovenia, including two new concepts - 343 (unroofed cave) and 344 (residual hill in polje).

• Italian: Concepts 68, 128, 131, 175, 342.
• Dutch: Fixed a problem with accented characters in Concepts 112, 261, 303.
• Portuguese: Concept 265.
• New Concepts 343 and 344: included with Slovenian, then added Croatian, Dutch, English, Italian, Latin, Portuguese.
• The Collaborators section of this Introduction page now shows which language each person contributed.
• The page describing how to send a whole new language has an updated template containing the two new concepts, and minor text changes.
• There is no visible difference on the web page, but all terms for all the dictionary languages are now converted, stored and processed as Unicode UTF-8 encoding, so now we can easily display the characterset for any of the world's languages on the same web page.

2013-02-22 Edition 12:
Added:

• Lithuanian terms by Erikas LAICONAS, from Lithuania.

2012-11-23 Edition 11:

A good response to a call for new languages resulted in three new languages:

• Indonesian terms by Arzyana SUNKAR, assisted by Eko HARYONO and Bagus YULIANTO, all from Indonesia.
• Swedish terms by Rabbe SJÖBERG, assisted by Johannes LUNDBERG, both of Sweden.
• Dutch terms by Silvia GOUTIER, assisted by Elvira SANDERS and Herman de SWART, all from The Netherlands.
• New Reference: PANOŠ, 2001.

• The page describing how to send a whole new language has been improved, and now includes a downloadable template to make it easier to submit a new language in the required format.

2009-12-15 Edition 10:
Added:

• First pass of Farsi/Persian terms by Saeed HAHSEMINEZHAD and Sarah EDALATIAN-ARASTEH of Iran.

2009-11-30 Edition 9:
Added:

• First pass of Bulgarian terms by Ivo TACHEV of Bulgaria.
• First pass of Serbian terms by Uros AKSAMOVIC of Serbia.

2009-06-08 Edition 8:
Updated:

• A major update of the Portuguese terms by Luiz TRAVASSOS of Brazil. The following 66 concepts were added or updated:
  13, 40, 42, 45, 47, 55, 56, 58, 70, 71, 75, 76, 79, 85, 85, 91, 95, 97, 109, 112, 121, 127, 133, 137, 144, 153, 154, 156, 157, 168, 171, 179, 181, 185, 186, 188, 192, 194, 196, 208, 210, 212, 214, 218, 230, 258, 269, 270, 276, 277, 278, 280, 288, 296, 302, 307, 308, 309, 310, 324, 330, 332, 336, 337, 338, 342.
• With better browsers the separate pages for Western and Central European terms had become unnecessary and were removed. We now use one page for all languages.
• Labels were added for each concept in the HTML code of the Dictionary page. Bookmarks can now point to individual concepts,
  e.g. http://www.uisic.uis-speleo.org/lexuni.html#126 will take you to Concept 126.
• The Dictionary Working Group Chairman is now emailed via a web form to reduce spam. The old dictionary@... address has been deactivated.

2007-09-03:
Added:

• New page explaining how to send a new language to the Dictionary.

• Intro Page: incorporated the above addition.

• First pass of Croatian terms by GARAŠIČ (HR). Our 9th language.
• References: UNESCO.
• Links: Field, Grimes, UNESCO.

• References: Field.
• Collaborators, Contributors.
• Miscellaneous clarifications and tidy-ups.

• Attila's death and Mladen's taking over as the new Chairman recorded. Mladen has also supplied Croatian for the Dictionary and it is currently being processed for loading on to the web pages.
• References.

23-Aug-2000 Edition 6:
Added:

• First pass of Italian terms by FERRARI (IT).
• Concepts: 341, 342.
• References: Cigna & Railton; Field, Kraemer & Palmer; Krause; Società Speleologica Italiana.

• Concepts: 1, 6, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16, 19, 21, 22, 25, 26, 32, 33, 35, 37, 39, 40, 41, 43-45, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 57-59, 63, 67, 70, 71, 75-79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 89, 90-94, 96-100, 102, 106, 109, 112, 114, 115, 119, 121, 124-128, 130-133, 135-138, 140, 141, 143-148, 150-159, 161-163, 165, 167, 168, 170, 173, 176-179, 181-183, 185, 186, 188, 189, 199, 201, 203, 204, 206, 208, 210-214, 217, 218, 221-223, 225-233, 236-239, 241, 242, 248-252, 254, 255, 258-261, 263, 265, 266, 268-273, 275-279, 281-284, 287-289, 291-294, 296, 297-309, 311, 313-326, 328-333, 336, 337, 338-340.
• Collaborators, Contributors.
• Browser Settings page.

• European mirror site link.

• First pass of Portuguese terms by TRAVASSOS (BR).
• First pass of Romanian terms by FEKETE (RO).
• Link to Garry Smith's Glossary.
• Extra pages to allow display of Central European character set.

27-Aug-1998 Edition 3:
Updated concepts: 5, 8, 13, 18, 28, 32, 36, 43, 74, 76, 80, 92, 134, 154, 233, 297, 332.

6-July-1998 Edition 2:
Updated concepts: 1, 3, 11, 46, 76, 78, 79, 91, 98, 123, 136, 137, 139, 145, 176, 206, 208, 229, 238, 251, 294, 298, 306, 321.

17-May-1998:
Initial on-line version with English, French, German and Hungarian. This was an updated web version of Attila KÓSA's existing hardcopy publication, The Caver's Living Dictionary ( Kósa 1995/6).