Asphodel Works Terminological Dictionary

This is a bidirectional database of specialised terminology from a wide range of fields intended for use by professional users of the English and Bulgarian languages. It does not contain everyday vocabulary but offers instead collocations and fixed expressions that the translator or philology/linguistics student should find useful in their work.

The dictionary is compiled from a vast number of sources, most prominent amongst which is the English-Bulgarian Technical Dictionary (Английско-български политехнически речник) first published in the early 1980s. Said dictionary's database has been uploaded to several online resource websites but without amending the many dozens of typos, OCR problems, and various other issues found in it ("calculagrap", "trunion fixture", "preliminary analises", "hydrochloric arid", "hoilow-cast piston", "bendant superheater", "rombic antenna", "rotable antenna", etc. are among the errors that have been replicated in all such websites), nor reviewing obsolete Bulgarian spelling that has since fallen out of use or has been completely abandoned, e.g. "въздействувам", which was changed to "въздействам" in the early to late 1990s. The Technical Dictionary database also contains numerous other errors that have been corrected only here, such as incorrectly rendering English terms using prepositional phrases with the preposition of, e.g. height of bed, height of beacon, length of a curve, depth of penetration, that are never used by native speakers, or the frankly absurd in height difference — all these have been amended to bed height, beacon height, curve length, penetration depth, difference in height. To the long list of issues we should also add translation errors such as mean depth = "хидравличен радиус" (геология); mean depth has been translated as hydraulic radius (Geology) — mean depth has no bearing on any kind of radius in any terminological domain whatsoever.

Many other terminology resources have been "harvested" to include here as well, supplementing the thematic richness of the dictionary with dozens of new fields such as Culinary, Sports & Gambling, Patent Law and General Law, Textile, Real Estate, Tourism & Travel, and — notably — Computers (IT, software, and hardware). Hundreds of new phrases have been extracted from various translation projects done by the compiler.

This dictionary is a work in progress: slightly more than 1/2 of the Technical Dictionary has been processed (manually) to include here because spotting and amending issues requires human labour. New entries are gradually added but without any regularity.

Unlike any other online or offline terminological resource, the Asphodel Works Terminological Dictionary allows selective querying of the database, i.e. choosing a specific field to search in; where all glossaries are searched simultaneously, results appear grouped by theme — another feature that no other dictionary has to offer. And more: the user can choose to search for any whole words, all whole words, exact matches, fuzzy matches, or abbreviations. A new feature was recently added that will show the definition for a term in Bulgarian and/or English (whichever is available) on hovering the mouse over the entry, or tapping it — on a mobile device (terms having definitions are marked with an asterisk [*]). That said, this is the only online terminological resource that uses responsive design, i.e. it will resize nicely to fit the user's device screen size, whether a desktop or laptop computer, tablet, or a smartphone.

The Asphodel Works Terminological Dictionary is compiled and designed by Stefan Stefanov, PhD, Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Specialised Translation, and CAT Tools at the English & American Studies Department of St Cyril and St Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo.

Change Log

As of May 2016, the database contained over 42,000 entries
In July 2017, the number was over 46,000
As of December 2017 — 50,000
As of mid-January 2019 — 53,895
As of mid-December 2022 — 55,377
As of late February 2024 — 56,271
As of late February 2025 — 56,936
In April 2025, the decision was made to make the entire terminological corpus available, rather than only verified entries as before. An icon now appears before each entry, indicating whether it is verified. On the search page, the number of verified entries is displayed first, followed by the total number.
In December 2025, in connection with the development of an Android app, the requirement to select search direction (e.g. English to Bulgarian or Bulgarian to English) was abolished to facilitate users.
21 February 2026: Security improvements and fixing a bug in searching for hyphenated terms. All numbers are now displayed in the correct language format (e.g. 1,494 not 1494).
25 February 2026: The database was cleared of most of the remaining plural duplicates (e.g. “margin of error” / “margins of error”), resulting in a reduction of about 540 entries. The numbers currently stand at 58,740 verified out of a total of 109,772 terms.
23 March 2026: Search algorithm corrections (exact match and fuzzy match). A new "Taboo" glossary was added that is only available to premium users. The Android app is in its final testing stage, pending official release.
5 April 2026: The Android app is now available on Google Play. Feature limitations have also been introduced to the dictionary's web version. A new glossary (Automation) was added. The Gambling glossary was expanded by approx. 40 terms. Over 300 terms have been verified manually (term count has increased from 60,529 to 60,852); approx. 500 unverified duplicates have been removed.
12 June 2026 — 61,509 verified from a total of 109,602 entries.
8 August 2026 — 62,613 verified from a total of 109,623 entries.
9 November 2026 — Dozens of translation errors in the source Polytechnical Dictionary have been corrected. A significant number of prepositional phrases using the preposition "of" have been fixed, e.g. "sag of belt" ⇒ "belt sag", and some with the preposition "with", e.g. "screw with decreasing pitch" ⇒ "decreasing-pitch screw". About 200 redundant plural forms have been purged. Dozens of typos in newly verified terms resulting from poor OCR have been fixed. Four new glossaries have been created: HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning), Glass & Ceramics, Paints & Coatings, and Technical Drawing. The Elevators glossary has been renamed to Elevators and Lifting Equipment and expanded to include such terminology. 76,379 verified from a total of 109,455 entries.