Mission
Word by word, we picture the world.
Lexis is a picture dictionary of the whole earth. Everyone gives words an image, in their own language. Together, all those images become one picture of the world.
One photograph
In 1966 Stewart Brand handed out buttons with a question: why hadn't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet? He believed that one image of our planet, small and blue against the black, would make people feel they belong together. Two years later such a photo was on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog. In 1972 the crew of Apollo 17 took the Blue Marble, the image at the top of this site.
That photograph caught everything at once: all people, all nations, all languages.
The reverse
Lexis does the reverse. We start with the small pieces: one word, one image, one person. A jellyfish in the sand. A jump from a bridge. Wind in a washing line. Each image is small. Together they form a portrait of what the world looks like, through the eyes of everyone who lives in it.
That's why there's no slogan under the earth on our home page, but a number: 25,598,007 words in 6,242 languages. That's how many images are still waiting.
Languages disappear
A language is more than a list of words. It holds a way of seeing. Hawaiian has words for rain that English doesn't. Goemai, spoken in Nigeria, has 426 words recorded in PanLex.
Of the living languages whose status is known, 59% are endangered: fewer and fewer children learn them. Nearly half of all languages in PanLex have fewer than a hundred words on record. For those languages, one image in Lexis can be the first image ever made for a word.
An app cannot save a language. It can make it visible. What you see, you start to value.
Seeing differently
The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)
Everyone sees a word differently. "Summer" is a beach for one person and a jump from a bridge for another. In Lexis you see how someone else looks, in a language you may not speak. Seeing how someone else looks changes how you look. That isn't a lesson in respect; it's simply what happens.
The adventure
Picking a word and looking for its image changes how you walk down the street. Suddenly you see "waiting" or "yellow" everywhere. Lexis is a reason to go outside and look more closely. There's no score and no end. You drift from word to image to word.
What Lexis is not
- Not social media. No likes, no follower counts, no rankings, no algorithm deciding what you see.
- Not AI art. Every image is made by a person. We use AI only behind the scenes, for example to spot abuse. Never to decide whether an image is beautiful enough.
- Not a business built on your data. No ads, no tracking. Lexis is becoming a foundation and runs on donations.
On the shoulders of
Lexis is built on PanLex, a project of the Long Now Foundation. Linguists gathered 7,027 dictionaries from all over the world into it, and released everything freely. Without their work, Lexis wouldn't exist.