Hypercontext was designed as a software tool to help with a process known as "hypertexting." When a file is hypertexted, the Tibetan words in the file are connected with the English words that they correspond to. These hypertexted files will then be used to create a Tibetan-English dictionary.
A “contextual dictionary,” in contrast to an ordinary dictionary, shows words in a variety of contexts. Being able to interactively browse multiple contexts at once nicely depicts the grammatical structure of a language, making it an excellent learning and teaching tool. Since the dictionary will be derived from actual translations of ancient Buddhist texts, it will be able to offer deep insights into how a text was translated, and what the text means.
The built-in dictionary that comes with Hypercontext was kindly provided by the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library under the terms of the THDL Open Community License. Hypercontext includes from this distribution Jim Valby's entire dictionary, as well as parts of Jeffrey Hopkins' Tibetan-Sanskrit-English Dictionary version 2.0.0.
