Online services providing information on Finnish words and phrases

This page is outdated, and much of it does not work. Please use the Finnish-language page Sanahakukone (Suomen kielen sanaa koskevan tiedon haku eri lähteistä) instead, if possible. This note added 2021-05-25.

This page is for searching information on words in the Finnish language. The tools here are based on JavaScript in order to make it easy to submit the same query to different servers. This page does not work properly on your browser with its current settings, which disable JavaScript execution.

This page is a tool for finding information on a Finnish word or phrase in several services such as dictionaries and terminological databases. The information mostly deals with the meaning, spelling, inflection, and hyphenation of words. Much of the information is in Finnish, so some understanding of the language is needed.

Enter a word or phrase in the box and click on one of the buttons.


•
•
This page has an interface to the following query systems:
Dict. Kielitoimiston sanakirja, Dictionary of the Language Office. The newest and official dictionary of Finnish.
Joukahainen. A database of Finnish words, including inflection information. Numerals and pronouns excluded. Based on voluntary work.
Intl. words. Pienehkö sivistyssanakirja, a smallish dictionary of international words in Finnish. By J. Korpela.
YSA. Yleinen suomalainen asiasanasto, General Finnish thesaurus. Especially for indexing and defining keywords.
TEPA. The terminology database of Sanasto­keskus TSK. Contains definitions for terms and corresponding terms in other languages.
ISK. Iso suomen kielioppi, a voluminous descriptive grammar of Finnish.
Kielikello. A periodical published by the Institute for the Languages of Finland. The search does not include issues of the current year.
Guidance DB. Kielitoimiston ohjepankki, an official database of questions and answers on Finnish spelling, grammar, and names.
Guide. Nykyajan kielenopas, a guide to correct use of Finnish, by J. Korpela. Uses the FreeFind search engine, which supports the * wildcard.
Etymology. A structured version of the etymological dictionary Suomen sanojen alkuperä. By Etymon Project.
Hyphenate. A hyphenator based on Voikko software. Shows the permitted word division points.
Analyze. HFST, omorfi – open morphol­ogy for Finnish, Univ. of Helsinki. See explanations of notations. There is an alternative service based on the same technology, at Univ. of Tromsø.
Wikipedia. The Wikipedia pages in Finnish.
Google. Google search restricted to pages in Finnish. The results always open in a separate window or tab.

Other resources

The following links point to resources that cannot be easily used via a unified interface like the one above. The resources may be specialized or difficult to use, or their use may require good understanding of Finnish.

Many of the services listed here exist primarily for other purposes but can also be used e.g. to check the official or recommended spelling of the Finnish name of an organization, law, book, animal species etc.

The codes in parentheses indicate the language(s) of the user interface of the service; en = English, fi = Finnish.

IATE (different languages, en by default)
European Union terminology, the multilingual terminology database of the EU.
Eesti etümoloogiasõnaraamat (et)
Etymological dictionary of the Estonian language, a relative of Finnish. Contains references to Finnish words.
Etymologinen viitetietokanta
Data base of etymological references. Does not contain etymologies but references to (printed) publications about etymologies of words.
EU:n tyyliohje (fi)
A multilingual guide (English version: Interinstitutional style guide) for documents of the EU administration. Largely useful as a general style guide too, but also contains some rules that violate national standards and rules. Contains conventions common to all (official EU) languages and language-specific conventions; the latter are presented only in the language itself.
Fennica (en, fi, sv)
The national bibliography. All books and periodicals published in Finland should be registered here.
Finto (en, fi, sv)
A thesaurus and an ontology service on Finnish and Swedish. The user interface is partly available in English. Finto contains several different vocabularies and ontologies, with varying level of maturity and reliability. For example, the Finnish Corporate Names section contains a large number of recommended form of the names of Finnish companies, institutes, etc. However, this means just “Finto recommended”; some the principles applied differ from those set by language authorities.
Kansallisbiografia (fi)
The national biography, over 6,000 people.
Korp (en, fi, sv)
A search system for texts in Finnish, containing 932 corpora, with over 8 billion word occurrences. Though it has user interface in English, too, its use requires better than elementary understanding of Finnish, some patience, and some experience with the system. In searching for occurrences of a rare word in contexts, it can be valuable. However, it only shows short fragments of texts, with no access to the corpora as such.
Nykysuomen sanakirja
The largest dictionary of Finnish, published 1951–1961. Available as six large PDF files.
Nykysuomen sanalista (fi)
A word list with 94,110 records in simple XML format, with inflection information. It can be used as test material for linguistic software, for example. Composed in 2007.
Oikofix (fi)
Spelling checker and word analyzer. The analysis shows the morphological structure of a word using Finnish grammar terms.
Slangi.net (fi)
Dictionaries of slang. Extensive, but confusingly organized. The most important part is slangi–suomi-sanakirja.
Suomen murteiden sanakirja (SMS) (fi)
Dictionary of Finnish dialects. This online version of SMS contains entries from the range A–L (as of November 2020).
Vanhan kirjasuomen sanakirja (VKS) (fi)
Dictionary of old written Finnish (from the 1540’s to year 1810). Currently contains a–perstauta.
Verbix (en)
Shows all inflected forms of a verb.
Webxicon (en), Sanakirja.org (fi)
A multilingual dictionary based on Wiktionary. With a good user interface that works even in very small devices. A large amount of data, but with no guarantee of reliability or quality, and mostly very short explanations.
First published . Last updated .

This page belongs to section Characters and encodings of the free information site IT and communication by Jukka “Yucca” Korpela.