Bilingual Malay-English-Malay Dictionary by pgoh13
English to Malay Dictionary
To read before using the English-Malay dictionary
The hyphen in English words: 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.
American and British spellings:
In general where there are differences between the American and British spellings I have kept to the British spelling rather than the American one (just a question of habit).
Verbs ending in -ize or -ise: 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").
Use capital letters: 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, etc. (eg. "Sunday" not "sunday"). Same for acronyms eg. "BFF" not "bff").
Scientific and technical terms: Please note that scientific and technical terms are beyond the scope of this dictionary but I try to include idiomatic expressions (eg. to sell someone a dummy) wherever possible. Please note that this dictionary is not meant to take the place of the dictionaries that have been published and which are on sale in the market.
- Webmaster (05 January 2012)
Malay to English Dictionary
To read before using the Malay-English dictionary
The hyphen in Malay words: Please note that hyphenated words in Malay must always be typed with the hyphen if you expect to find them here (eg. undang-undang, NOT undangundang, mengapi-apikan, NOT mengapiapikan). This is because the hyphen is an integral part of a Malay word. I know it's just the opposite in my English-Malay section but then the hyphen in English words often disappears over time, which is not the case with Malay hyphenated words!
Type Malay word with its prefix and suffix:
One innovative feature of this dictionary is that you can type a word with its prefix and suffix (eg. mengenakan or menyertai) to get its meaning and also be told from what word it comes from. In a typical Malay dictionary, such words would only appear under their root words (in this case kena or serta) and if you don't know what their root words are, you will never be able to look them up in a Malay dictionary. While this might be obvious to many Malaysians, it is not the case for students of Bahasa Malaysia. Take the very common word sedikit (=a little), for example. You will not find it in most dictionaries (not even in Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka's "Kamus Dewan" Edisi Keempat). Why? Simply because you have to look it up under its root word, which is dikit. Same for pejabat (=office). You have to look for it under jabat. How many students would be able to do this, I wonder.
As a result of this arrangement, you will not find any of the derived words (with prefixes or suffixes) grouped together under the root word here as is done in most Malay dictionaries. Each word that has a prefix or suffix will be treated here as an independent entry. Thus if you happen to come across the word perkelahian, for example, in your reading, just type the whole word as you see it (with its prefix and suffix). Don't try to look it up under its root word (which is kelahi).
As almost every verb in Malay can be made passive by just putting the prefix di before it, I am afraid I have to leave all these verbs out. Just be aware that if the verb "to beat" is pukul, then dipukul would simply mean "is beaten", "are beaten", "was beaten" etc.
