Introduction

To get the ball rolling with a solid starting point, the original Chairman's (Attila KÓSA) existing hardcopy publication, The Caver's Living Dictionary ( Kósa 1995/6), was updated and used for the initial web pages. This covered Hungarian, French, German and English. To make it easier to maintain, all the words are stored in a database which is used to automatically generate the updated web pages.

Of course, many other workers have contributed significantly in this field - see the list of references and the web links below. We are hoping that some of these other authors will be able to join in and make this a truly International on-line joint effort, and so rapidly increase its usefulness to all of us.

While there will always be a place for hardcopy versions, some of the advantages of this on-line version are:

• readily available to all cavers and karst workers around the world.
• always up-to-date, without the effort and expense associated with the reprinting of a paper edition.
• can be downloaded for off-line searching when not on the Internet.
• rapid turnaround for additions and corrections.
• an opportunity for all interested cavers around the world to participate in its construction.
• negligible publication costs.
• on-line text searching means that alphabetically sorted versions for each language do not have to be produced - one version is sufficient, regardless of how many languages are included.

[ Co-ordination ] [ Feedback ] [ References ] [ Links ] [ Acknowledgements ] [ Contributing a new language ]
[ The Dictionary ] [ What's New ]

The work of the Dictionary is being co-ordinated by Prof. Dr. Mladen GARAŠIČ of Croatia, Chairman of the Caver's Dictionary Working Group of the Informatics Commission of the International Union of Speleology.

Please get in touch with him if you would like to join the Working Group, or just help with the project.

History: Sadly, the Dictionary's original pioneer and Chairman, Attila KÓSA of Hungary, died on 2003-10-20 [ Obituary ]. His hard work and that of his collaborators had brought the Dictionary up to eight languages - English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. In June 2005 we were fortunate to find a new Chairman when Mladen GARAŠIČ of Croatia very kindly offered to take over the work.

ASHBROOK, B., GLIGAN, M. (1993)

An English-Romanian Caver's Dictionary. Pack Rat Scat No. 52, Summer, 1993. The Greater Allentown Grotto, PA, USA.

BALÁZS, D. (1990)

A karsztológiában és szpeleológiában használt fontosabb idegen szakkifejezések szótára - Karszt és Barlang, 1990. II. pp 127. Budapest.

BINI, A., MENEGHEL, M., SAURO, U. (1986)

Proposta di legenda per una cartografia geomorfologica delle aree carsiche - Atti e Memorie della Comm. Grotte "E. Boegan" Vol. 25., pp. 21-59. Trieste.

CIGNA, A. A., RAILTON, C. L. (1977)

Glossario speleologico - Speleological Glossary - Le Grotte d'Italia, (4) VII (1977), Bologna.

CULLINGFORD, C. H. D. (1962)

British Caving - London.

CULLINGFORD, C. H. D. (1969)

Manual of Caving Techniques - London.

ERARD, J. (1992)

Vocabulaire allemand-français de spéléologie - Paris.

FIELD, M. S., KRAEMER, S. R., PALMER, A. N. (1999)

A Lexicon of Cave and Karst Terminology with Special Reference to Environmental Karst Hydrology - U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington DC.

FIELD, M. S. (2002)

A Lexicon of Cave and Karst Terminology with Special Reference to Environmental Karst Hydrology. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Report EPA/600/R-02/003 (Supersedes 1999 edition) - U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington DC. [ EPA's PDF version (2.4MB)], [ Karst Waters Institute's PDF version (724KB)].

FRACHON, J.C. (1990)

Lexique Speleo-Secours/Cave Rescue Vocabulary (English - Dutch - French - German - Hungarian - Italian - Portuguese - Slovak) - Spéléo-Secours Français.

GÈZE, B. (1973)

Lexique des termes français de Spéléologie physique et de karstologie - Annales de Spéléologie, Tome 28, Fascicule 1.

JENNINGS, J.N. (1979)

Cave and Karst Terminology - Australian Speleological Federation.
Web version: http://www.caves.org.au/i_terminology.htm

KÓSA, A. (1967)

Szpeleológiai szakkifejezések, angol-magyar (kézirat gyanánt) - Budapest.

KÓSA, A. (1995/96) (with Chabert, C., Hazslinszky, T., Holzmann, H., Marek-Limagne, E., and Oldham, A.).

The Cavers' Living Dictionary - Five editions (GB, F, D, H) - Hungarian Speleological Society, ER-PETRO Ltd. Budapest.

KÓSA, A. (1997)

The Making of the Caver's Living Dictionary - Proceedings of the 12th International Congress of Speleology Vol. 5, pp. 129. La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.

KÓSA, A., HAZSLINSZKY, T., MAREK, E., SZENTIRMAY, L. (1989)

MAGYAR-angol-francia-német-orosz szpeleológiai szógyûjtemény - Budapest (UIS Congress).

KRAUSE, M. (1999)

Lexicon für Höhlenforscher - D-Bielefeld.

LIMAGNE, R.(1991, 1994)

Comment dit-on? (140 termes usuels en spéléologie traduits du français en: Albanais / Anglais / Allemand / Espagnol / Hongrois / Italien / Néerlandais / Polonais / Portugais / Roumain / Slovaque / Russe) - Ecole Française de Spéléologie. Lyon.

LOWE, D. & WALTHAM, A.(1995)

A Dictionary of Karst and Caves - Cave Studies Series Number 6, British Cave Research Association, London.

MOHR, C. E. & POULSON, T. L. (1966)

The Life of the Cave (Our Living World of Nature) - McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York.

MONROE, W.H. (1970)

A Glossary of Karst Terminology. U.S. Geological Survey Water Supply Paper 1899-K - U.S. Geological Survey, Washington DC.

PANOŠ, V. (2001)

Karsologická a speleologická terminologie: výkladový slovník s ekvivalenty ve slovenštině a jednacích jazycích Mezinárodní speleologické unie (UNESCO) (angličtina, francouzština, italština, němčina, ruština, španělština) - Žilina, Slovakia.

SOCIETÀ SPELEOLOGICA ITALIANA (1978)

Manuale di speleologia - Milano.

SWEETING, M. M. (1973)

Karst Landforms - Columbia University Press, New York.

TIMOFEEV, D.A., DUBLYANSKY, B.N., KIKNADZE, T.Z. (1991)

Terminologiya Karsta (in Russian) - Moscow.

TRIMMEL, H. (1965)

Speläologisches Fachwörterbuch - Wien.

UNESCO (1972)

Glossary and Multilingual Equivalents of 227 Karst Terms. (First preliminary edition) - Paris. [ PDF version]

VENKOVITS, I. (1960)

Karsztnevezéktani vita - Karszt és Barlangkutatás, I. évf, 1959, pp 67. Budapest.

WINKELHÖFER, P. & R. (1992)

Speläo-signaturen (deutsch, englisch, russich). Dresden.

Other web links

• Jennings - Cave and Karst Terminology.
  http://www.caves.org.au/i_terminology.htm
• Jennings - Cave and Karst Terminology - Peter Ackroyd's hyperlinked version
  http://werple.net.au/~gah/speleology/glossary.htm
• Max Meth's Draft Glossary of Speleological and Caving Terms
  http://werple.net.au/~gnb/caving/glossary/
• Garry Smith's Glossary of Caving Terms
  http://wasg.iinet.net.au/glossary.html
• Fevrier's Caving Glossary (GB-FR-US).
  http://www.inria.fr/agos-sophia/sis/dico.html
• Carl Ockier's Climbing Dictionary (de, en, es, fr, it, pl, sv)
  http://www.fm.bs.dlr.de/misc/climbing/climbing_dict.html
• Bill Elliott's Glossary of Biospeleology - based on Mohr & Poulson's The Life of the Cave.
  http://www.utexas.edu/depts/tnhc/.www/biospeleology/glossary.htm
• Andy Waddington's "Useful Vocabulary" (de, en, es, fr).
  http://www.chaos.org.uk/cucc/Expo/Handbook/Vocab.htm
• Graziano Ferrari's Multi-lingual Cave Survey Dictionary (de, es, fr, hu, it, nl, pt).
  http://net.onion.it/speleoit/varie/survey_dict.htm
• UISIC's preliminary list of coded English/German terms for cave databases.
  http://www.uisic.uis-speleo.org/exchange/atdecode.html
• UNESCO's 1972 "Glossary and Multilingual Equivalents of 227 Karst Terms"
  http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0000/000019/001976Eb.pdf
• Ken Grimes' Glossary of Volcanic, Cave and Karst Terms
  http://home.mira.net/~gnb/caving/papers/kg-svckt.html
• Malcolm Field's "A Lexicon of Cave and Karst Terminology with Special Reference to Environmental Karst Hydrology"
  http://www.karstwaters.org/files/glossary.pdf

Acknowledgements

Contributors:
Others who have made suggestions for additions or corrections to date.
ASHBROOK, Bert (US). The Greater Allentown Grotto. Jun 98.
BISCHOFF, Brian (IS). Oct 99.
CIGNA, Arrigo (IT). Mar 2013.
CRYSTAL, Bonnie (US). Speleoradiology Western Survey. May 98.
CSER, Ferenc (AU). Jun 98.
DE SCHRYVER, Jacques (FR). Aug 99.
ELLIOTT, Bill (US). Missouri Department of Conservation. Jun 98.
ESKES, David (NL). Speleo Nederland. May 98.
FERRARI, Graziano (IT). May 98.
HILL, Carol (US). May 98.
HILL, Paul (US). May 98.
LARIO, Javier (ES). Departamento de Geologia, Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales. Jun 98.
LABEGALINI, José Ayrton (BR). May 99.
MALECKAR, Franci (SI) Feb. 99
MINTON, Mark (US) Jul 00.
PRICE, Liz (GB). Apr 99, Jun 99.
PROFFITT, Merrilee (US). May 98.
STEVEN, Linda (FR). Aug 99.
WADDINGTON, Andy (GB). Northern Pennine Club & Cambridge Univ. C.C. Jun 98.

Updates

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.

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