POINTS TO NOTE WHEN USING THE DICTIONARY
For practical reasons (to avoid ambiguity and hesitation) I have decided to discard the hyphen in hyphenated words and to treat them as a single word. Thus if you should type "absent-minded", "run-of-the-mill" or "state-of-the-art" (i.e. with the hyphens) you will not get an answer but if you type "absentminded", "runofthemill" or "stateoftheart" (yes, without the hyphens) you would. Over the course of time hyphenated words tend to lose their hyphens anyway.
In general where there are differences between the American and British spellings I have kept to the British spelling rather than the American one (question of habit). So look under -our instead of -or (eg. "colour" not "color"), -re instead of -er (eg. "meagre" not "meager") and -ae instead of -e- (eg. "aesthetic" not "esthetic").
Verbs that can end in either -ize or -ise. Look for them under -ize as they won't appear under -ise (eg. "criticize" not "criticise"). The -ize form is acceptable both in British English and American English and is now considered to be the world English spelling for such verbs.
Please note also that this dictionary is case-sensitive i.e. you have to type in capital letters the first letter of countries, days of the week, months of the year, languages, races, abbreviations, etc. (eg. "Sunday" not "sunday", "SMS" not "sms").
Also make sure that the word you are looking for is correctly typed. Thus typing "berzerk" instead of "berserk" will not give you an answer.
In the interest of correct usage and in keeping with standard practice, verbs when translated into Malay are given under their usual forms in Malay i.e. with the prefix added to it (eg. "run" is translated as "berlari" not "lari" and "sweep" is translated as "menyapu", not "sapu" which is its root form).
Unfortunately, given the limited time and resources at my disposal, I was not able to put in more idiomatic expressions so those who can afford to do so will still need to buy a good English-Malay dictionary for this as well as for illustrative sentences on the usage of each word.
Please note that scientific and technical terms are beyond the scope of this dictionary. In fact it is just meant to help out those who are constantly on the move and do not always have a dictionary at hand. It is not meant to take the place of the dictionaries that have been published and which are on sale in the market.
My principal sources of reference are: (1) Kamus Dewan edisi keempat (2) Kamus Inggeris-Melayu Dewan and (3) Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Every serious student of Malay should try to possess the first two dictionaries mentioned above which are published by the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, the foremost authority on the Malay language in Malaysia. I have used them as guidelines in the compilation of this online dictionary (especially if there is any doubt over the spelling of a word).
My grateful thanks to Ian D. Miller, a volunteer with allexperts.com for online help with the php script in its initial stages. - GPJ
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