This page describes policies and practices specific to Ancient Egyptian entries on the English Wiktionary. These are in addition to Wiktionary’s overall standards which are listed at Wiktionary:Entry layout explained. It remains a work in progress, and you are encouraged to offer criticism, suggestions, and other input.
This page discusses only Ancient Egyptian—Coptic is discussed separately at Wiktionary:About Coptic, Egyptian Demotic at Wiktionary:About Demotic, and the Egyptian dialect of Arabic at Wiktionary:About Egyptian Arabic.
The normal standard to verify that a word or sense exists for well-documented modern languages is three independent attestations. However, Egyptian, as a dead language, requires only one attestation.
Lemmatization and stages of the language
[edit]Words are entered in transliterated form. Redirects can be created from hieroglyphic entries to transliterated entries.
Wiktionary describes and includes words from all stages of the Egyptian language—Archaic, Old, Middle, Neo-Middle, and Late. (The Demotic and Coptic stages are treated separately under their own headings and not included under Egyptian.) If a word is attested in different forms across the centuries, a conservative Middle Egyptian spelling of the word should be taken as the ideal basis for lemmatization. This form of Egyptian flourished from 2000 BCE to 1300 BCE and continued to be used as a literary language (Neo-Middle Egyptian) long afterwards. The one significant exception to this rule for lemmatization is that s and z should always be clearly distinguished, as in Old Egyptian, in those words that existed when such a distinction was made. Words that only existed after the s/z distinction collapsed should be lemmatized with s.
All words (and meanings) restricted to a particular time period should note their time period with the template {{defdate}} placed after the definition; those restricted to particular stages of the language should note their stages in an {{lb}} template placed before the definition. Note that these two are not the same: for much of the language’s history the stages overlapped, as older ones remained in literary use while newer ones were used for more colloquial texts.
Geminate verbs should be lemmatized under their geminate stems, while non-geminate strong verbs should be lemmatized under their base stems, and weak verbs should be lemmatized with a final radical j or w, as appropriate. Thus e.g. qbb (“to cool”) rather than qb, wnn (“to exist”) rather than wn, jrj (“to do”) rather than jr.
Entries for single hieroglyphs
[edit]Egyptian hieroglyphs should not be confused with Egyptian words or morphemes. Individual glyphs should have entries at their Unicode codepoints with a Symbol header; if they are used as logograms for entire words, they should link to those (transliterated) words in their definitions. 𓁹 is a good example of how Egyptian hieroglyph entries should ideally be formatted.
There are many systems for romanizing Egyptian text, which are broadly similar, but disagree on details. See Appendix:Egyptian transliteration schemes for a comprehensive overview. Wiktionary uses a romanization system that more closely follows the written form of the hieroglyphs than many other such systems in order to keep debated theoretical considerations to a minimum.
Wiktionary romanizes the uniliteral signs as follows:
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| ꜣ |
j |
j |
y |
ꜥ |
w |
b |
p |
f |
m |
n |
r |
h
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| ḥ |
ḫ |
ẖ |
z |
s |
š |
q |
k |
g |
t |
ṯ |
d |
ḏ
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Capital letters are not used.
The sort order is as shown in the table above. It is used in ordering the entries in categories and in automatically sorted column templates such as {{col-auto}}.
Weak and omitted consonants
[edit]Some Egyptian consonants are frequently omitted in writing, and especially at the ends of words. These ‘weak’ consonants include w, j, y, and ꜣ. They should be transliterated when present, as well as in the lemma forms of weak verbs; otherwise, when absent but expected, they should be indicated inside parentheses in quotations and notes (within the body of an entry) but omitted from entry titles. There is one exception to this guideline, however: when such consonants are omitted from verb form endings that regularly come before the determinative, they should never be supplied – not even in parentheses – but simply left untransliterated. This restriction is made necessary by the frequent uncertainty in what the underlying form of a given verb is or which particular verbal adjective a given form represents. Suffix pronouns, the passive .tw, and stative endings come after the determinative and are exempt from this restriction.
Certain other consonants are regularly omitted from the writing of particular individual words but otherwise always present where expected; an example is the n in ḥnqt (“beer”). This seems to represent a mere orthographic abbreviation. Such consonants should similarly be indicated inside parentheses in quotations and notes, but they should also be included in entry titles.
When signs such as
ꜣ,
n,
r, and
rw are known or suspected to represent an underlying /l/, they should nonetheless be romanized according to their written form and not as
l. Details about the underlying pronunciation should be left to the pronunciation section.
should be transliterated as
z in the context of Old Egyptian or in later chronolects (Middle or Late Egyptian) when the spelling is etymological, but as
s when it is used in Middle or Late Egyptian for etymological
s. Also see the
note on lemmatization above.
Characters which are not romanized
[edit]Determinatives are omitted from the romanization. Further, phonetic complements (uniliterals which follow a biliteral/triliteral and are intended only to clarify its pronunciation) are not romanized either. Thus:
| The word: |
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| Romanization: |
jmn
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However, when a phonetic complement’s romanization conflicts with that of the sign it is complementing, precedence is given to the value suggested by the complement. Thus:
| The word: |
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| Romanization: |
jtj, not jṯj
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Suffix pronouns and stative pronouns/suffixes are separated from the stem by a period/full stop ., as are the verbal prefix j. and other suffixes that are generally written after the determinative of the word they attach to. Other suffixes and inflectional endings written before the determinative or as part of the determinative should not be separated, e.g. for the plural of ꜥnḫ write ꜥnḫw rather than ꜥnḫ.w or ꜥnḫ·w.
Compound words should always be joined together with a hyphen if:
- they are proper nouns or titles or conventional divine/royal epithets;
- they consist of elements bound in a direct genitive construction (including the nfr ḥr and reverse nisba constructions);
- they consist of a series of synonymous elements in apposition;
- they are thoroughly grammaticalized as a unit and bleached of most of their semantic content;
- their elements are written with places exchanged due to honorific transposition; or
- they are represented by a single shared glyph, or else share determinatives that apply to the whole compound rather than any single element of it.
Compounds in most other circumstances should be left unhyphenated; a space should be used instead. Examples include indirect genitives, prepositional phrases, and nouns modified by participles. Hyphenation of compound verbs has yet to be properly settled.
Group writing is not treated specially; signs are still transliterated as above, even those that no longer represent consonants in the various group-writing systems.
Alternative readings and transliterations
[edit]Sometimes the reading of a word may be debated or uncertain; in this case, one form should be chosen as the lemma and the other readings (all employing the Wiktionary transliteration system) should be made into soft redirects.
Pages which currently exist using another transliteration system should be shifted to the correct namespace and then listed for deletion, unless they use the Manuel de Codage system, in which case they should redirect to the main entry. If, however, they are likely to also be a term in another language, then they should be made into a soft redirect (see the Wiktionary policy on redirects).
Missing, erroneous, and abbreviated text
[edit]In quotations from Egyptian sources, it is common to find text that is destroyed, abbreviated, erroneously written or omitted, etc. The standard way to deal with such text is to use a variation of the brackets of the Leiden Conventions to mark the text in question. Thus:
| Type of text |
Representation in romanization |
Representation in hieroglyphs |
WikiHiero code
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| Text abbreviated or otherwise intentionally omitted by the scribe |
(text) |
do not add |
do not add
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| Text once present but now missing or destroyed |
[text] |
 | text | ![]]](/w/extensions/wikihiero/img/hiero_Ba15a.png?0f12b "]]") |
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[[-text-]]
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 | text |  |
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[[s-text-]]s
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| Text erroneously omitted by the scribe |
⟨text⟩ |
 | text |  |
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[&-text-&]
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 | text |  |
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[&s-text-&]s
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| Text erroneously added by the scribe |
{text} |
 | text | ![}]](/w/extensions/wikihiero/img/hiero_Ba17a.png?09a25 "}]") |
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[{-text-}]
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 | text |  |
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[{s-text-}]s
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Modern correction of erroneously written text
(preferably use {original text}⟨corrected text⟩ instead) |
⸢text⸣ |
 | text |  |
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['-text-']
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 | text |  |
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['s-text-']s
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| Text deleted in antiquity |
⟦text⟧ |
 | text |  |
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["-text-"]
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 | text |  |
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["s-text-"]s
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Parentheses should also be used in translations to enclose modern editorial comments and clarifying words.
The Manuel de Codage system, implemented with WikiHiero and the module Module:egy-hieroglyphs, allows hieroglyphs to be entered using a standard keyboard, without any special characters, when placed inside certain template parameters or wrapped in the template {{egy-h}}. Under the Manuel de Codage system, every hieroglyph has a unique code. For the alphabetic hieroglyphs the input codes are as follows (note that the system is case sensitive):
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| A |
i |
y |
i-i |
a |
w |
W |
b |
p |
f |
m |
M |
n |
N |
r
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| l |
h |
H |
x |
X |
z |
s |
S |
q |
k |
g |
t |
T |
d |
D
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The more common biliterals and triliterals can be entered using the same system, like so:
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etc.
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| bA |
aA |
pA |
Dd |
mwt |
etc.
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A list of these codes can be seen here.
Less common biliterals and triliterals and most determinatives must be entered using their Gardiner number (note that case remains essential):
The most powerful aspect of the system is its ability to control the arrangement of a series of hieroglyphs. This is accomplished using the following punctuation marks: - : * <> !
Each hieroglyphic character must be separated from the next one by one of these marks.
| Mark |
Function |
Code example |
Example
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- |
Places two signs beside each other (the default position) |
{{egy-h|Htp-t-p}} |
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: |
places one sign on top of another |
{{egy-h|t:p}} |
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* |
Holds two signs together horizontally (e.g. so that both of them will go under a third sign) |
{{egy-h|Htp:t*p}} |
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< > |
Places a cartouche around signs |
{{egy-h|<-p:p-i-i->}} |
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<h1 h1> |
Places a rectangular enclosure around signs |
{{egy-h|<h1-p:p-i-i-h1>}} |
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! |
Ends line (necessary only when quoting multiple lines of Egyptian) |
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SPACE |
Enters a full-width blank space. |
{{egy-h|mn:n-t:Z9-nw-SPACE-V1}} |
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H_SPACE |
Enters a small blank space. |
{{egy-h|mn:n-t:Z9-nw-H_SPACE-V1}} |
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\ |
Mirrors the preceding glyph. |
{{egy-h|nw:k\}} |
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More detailed notes about the syntax of WikiHiero are available here, and notes about additional functionality added by Wiktionary are available here.
WikiHiero does not support the use of parentheses for deeper stacking as used in other implementations of the Manuel de Codage. In the case that such a stacking is desired, it must be accepted that having all the characters displayed is ultimately more important than having them authentically stacked.
Some more obscure characters (particularly unusual determinatives) are not natively included in WikiHiero’s repertoire, but added functionality on Wiktionary enables one to make use of them in much the same way as the native WikiHiero glyphs. If these additional glyphs are not grouped in a quadrat with other glyphs, they can be input normally using their Gardiner codes (or Hieroglyphica codes, for glyphs beyond Gardiner) like any other glyph. If they are grouped with other glyphs, however, the whole group must be preceded by a tilde (~), but otherwise they remain input normally.
A large repertoire of Egyptian hieroglyphs has been added to the Unicode standard starting in 2009 with the release of version 5.2 (and expanding greatly in 2024 with 16.0), using the Unicode blocks U+13000–U+1342F and U+13460–U+143FF. See Wikipedia’s w:Egyptian hieroglyphs#Unicode. The code points are supported by various fonts such as Abydos, NewGardiner, and JSeshFont. However, no fonts yet exist that support the control characters necessary for clustering, stacking, and arranging glyphs, and so Unicode representation of complete hieroglyphic words is not yet workable.
Rearranging vertical columns of hieroglyphs
[edit]Hieroglyphs originally written in vertical columns must by necessity be rearranged into horizontal rows when entered into Wiktionary. In such cases individual groups of signs (quadrats) should generally be kept intact as far as possible and simply reordered from their original top-to-bottom array into a left-to-right one. However, this rule should be overridden in certain circumstances: words larger than a single quadrat should not be made to overlap with each other in the same quadrat but should be split so that each word occupies its own separate set of quadrats. Note that this does not hold for words that entirely fit in a single quadrat, which can freely be combined in their quadrat with trailing or leading glyphs from preceding or following words. Suffixes and prefixes (including suffix pronouns and stative endings) should be considered parts of the words they attach to when applying this rule.
Egyptian has a large set of intransitive verbs traditionally called adjective verbs, used to indicate a quality or the entrance into a quality. Most adjectives in Egyptian—probably all but the nisbas—are in fact participles of adjective verbs. Thus, the adjective wr (“great”) is in fact simply the perfective participle of the adjective verb wrr (“to be(come) great”).
Whether the basic meaning of adjective verbs is to indicate a quality or the entrance into a quality (‘to be …’ or ‘to become …’) is still unsettled; both interpretations can be found in modern Egyptology, as the choice depends on the interpretation of the Egyptian tense–aspect–mood (TAM) system. For this reason, we generally enter the definitions of such verbs using language such as ‘to be(come) …’.
Because most Egyptian adjectives are in fact verb forms, the entries for such participles should be kept fairly minimal, with most of the information removed to the parent verb entry. Usually, the definition line for a non-nisba adjective should simply consist of the verb form template {{egy-verb form of}} with the appropriate parameters, followed by a colon and a broad gloss of the participle’s meaning. Since most such adjectives are perfective active participles, a typical use might be {{egy-verb form of|[parent verb entry name]|pfv|act|ptcp}}: [gloss]
Most headers have a basic description in WT:ELE. However, Egyptian has a few special concerns which will be dealt with here. If you have further questions after reading this section, check out WT:ELE, as headers have a somewhat fuller description there. Headers are listed here in the order they should be found in entries, and at the proper level (the number of equal signs which should surround them in the editing window). Keep in mind that it is not necessary to use all of these every time. Simply put what you know (or can find) and someone else will fill it out later. The only headers which are necessary for every entry are the Language (Egyptian) and POS header.
==Egyptian==
===Etymology===
===Pronunciation===
===(POS)===
====Usage notes====
====Inflection====
====Alternative forms====
====Synonyms====
====Antonyms====
====Derived terms====
====Related terms====
====Descendants====
===References===
Language header, at level 2.
Etymologies list the word(s) from which the entry comes from genetically, and should be encoded using {{m}}. If a word comes from a word in another language, the language should be noted, generally best coded using {{der}}. The same format should be used when noting Egyptian words in the etymologies of non-Egyptian entries. When an Egyptian word is hypothesized to come from a term that is not attested but merely reconstructed, an asterisk * should be added the the start of the reconstructed etymon to indicate that it is a reconstructed form. Cognates in sister languages are useful: Akkadian, Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew are the usual suspects. However, note that there is no academic consensus on any reconstruction of Proto-Afroasiatic, and so any mentions of Proto-Afroasiatic terms should be noted as highly speculative and sourced to the scholar that hypothesized them.
In general, when using other languages in an etymology, they should be written in the appropriate script and transliterated, according to the source language’s policies. If you only have access to a transliteration, put it unlinked, and add {{rfscript}}, which marks the entry for attention from someone knowledgeable about the particular script. If you are uncertain of the meaning, spelling, or some other facet of the word, you can use {{attention}} to mark the entry for attention from someone knowledgeable about the language.
This heading is also used to group together POS entries with similar etymologies.
A few types of pronunciations can be found in this section:
Reconstructed Egyptian
[edit]This is the reconstructed pronunciation that is believed to be the way speakers of Egyptian pronounced the words. Different authors may provide different reconstructions, so these should generally be cited with a reference to the source or the system used. For consistency between entries, Wiktionary’s own reconstructions should follow the system described at Appendix:Egyptian pronunciation.
Egyptological pronunciation
[edit]Egyptological pronunciation is the way Egyptologists conventionally pronounce these words today. It is an entirely invented system that has no connection to how these words were pronounced by speakers of Egyptian. Egyptological pronunciations can be automatically supplied by the template {{egy-IPA-E}}; see the notes on that template’s documentation page for details.
The “Part of Speech” headers which are currently used within Egyptian are: Adjective, Adverb, Determiner, Interjection, Noun, Numeral, Particle, Prefix, Preposition, Prepositional phrase, Pronoun, Proper noun, Romanization, Suffix, Symbol, and Verb. These largely represent the standard across languages in Wiktionary. If an entry contains a different POS header than those listed above, it is likely incorrect. Different POS headers may be acceptable, but should be carefully checked and discussed with other editors.
Directly underneath the POS header is the word itself, in hieroglyphs, which is typically formatted with a template such as {{egy-noun|head=}}. The code for the hieroglyphs can be directly entered into the |head= parameter, without the need to wrap it in any other tags or templates. For nouns, gender should be noted by passing an m or f as the template’s first parameter. For verbs, the verb root class can be noted (if known) by passing an appropriate code as the first parameter; see {{egy-verb}}. For details on each part of speech, see the templates at Category:Egyptian headword-line templates.
This will be the first time that the hieroglyphs appear in the entry and therefore it should come before sections like “alternative forms”, which often precede this section in other languages on Wiktionary. The definitions immediately follow the hieroglyphs.
If the word is only attested over a certain timespan, this should be noted in the definition lines using {{defdate}}. If it is only attested in a certain stage or register of the language, such as Old Egyptian, Late Egyptian, or Neo-Middle Egyptian, this should be noted before the definition using {{lb}}.
A general purpose header which is used for information which does not fit into other headers. This is one of the few headers which regularly contains prose. Information which can be reasonably put here includes notes about syntax, inflection, and locality.
Egyptian is an inflected language, but the inflections tend to be fairly simple and straightforward—irregularities are genuinely rare. For such languages it is usual to put the inflections on the headword line—but the amount of space which hieroglyphs can take up and the variation inherent in the hieroglyphic system makes this impractical for Egyptian. This information should be listed in a table below the definitions and usage notes, in romanized form. Hieroglyphs can be added also, but this is probably only necessary if something particularly odd happens.
For nouns, use the template {{egy-decl-noun}} (see the documentation at the template page for usage):
Declension of About Egyptian (feminine)
For adjectives, use the template {{egy-decl-adj}} (see the documentation at the template page for usage):
Declension of About Egyptian (perfective active participle)
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masculine
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feminine
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| singular
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nfr
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nfrt
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| dual
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nfrwj
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nfrtj
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| plural
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nfrw
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nfrwt1, nfrt2
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- Archaic in Middle Egyptian when modifying a noun.
- From Middle Egyptian, this feminine singular form was generally used for the plural.
In Late Egyptian, the masculine singular form was used with all nouns.
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This will automatically categorize nisba adjectives as such.
Verbs are more complicated: see Appendix:Egyptian verbs for all eighteen transitive conjugations and the various irregulars (intransitives are identical but lack a passive in the finite forms—but they still have passive participles). Templates exist for conjugating all classes of verbs; see Category:Egyptian verb inflection-table templates for a list.
Alternative ways of writing the word in hieroglyphs should go here, ideally accompanied by their transliterations. Generally, the most common spelling will have a full entry, while the less common spellings will be listed. Some variants are exceptionally common and may not be worth noting:
- interchange between and ; many publications are inconsistent in how they transcribe these from hieratic, so differences in sources don’t necessarily reflect real differences in the text
- interchange between s and z after Old Egyptian, as this is extremely common
- forms consisting of the same hieroglyphs in the same order but arranged into groups differently
- Common interchanges of equivalent determinatives, e.g. versus
It is usually best to list variant forms using the template {{egy-hieroforms}}, rather than line by line, e.g.:
Alternative hieroglyphic writings of About Egyptian
Where a variant spelling has a distinctly different meaning, it is better treated as a distinct word, with a separate sub-entry.
The following headers contain only bulleted lists. Bullets are created by starting the line with an asterisk (*), followed by a single space, followed by the content. Words linked to in such lists are best encoded using {{l}} (remember to specify the language).
Semantic relations are described in the following two headers: Synonyms and Antonyms. These are words which are related semantically, that is, by their meanings. They can be etymologically/genetically related, but they don’t have to be.
Words which have the same or similar meanings are place here. They may be etymologically (genetically) related, but they do not have to be. Synonyms should be bulleted and sorted by the sense which they share, which is specified using {{sense}}.
Words which have an opposing meaning are placed here. Content under this header is formatted identically to that under the Synonym header, namely it is bulleted and sorted by sense using {{sense}}.
Genetic relations between words are described in the following headers, in addition to Etymology, which comes earlier in the entry. These words must always be genetically related, but need not be semantically related, though they often are. The Etymology header describes the entry’s predecessor(s), where the following headers describe other genetic relations.
Derived terms (Egyptian words)
[edit]Derived terms are other Egyptian words which derive from the entry word. Non-Egyptian words which derive from the term should be placed under “Descendants”. Words in this section should be listed in romanized form inside a template such as {{col-auto}}. An easy method for searching for derived terms and descendants is to click the “What links here” link on the left (please check through these before adding them to sections).
This section is, like derived terms, only for other Egyptian words which are in some way etymologically related to the entry word, such as a word which shares the same etymon. It is often useful for words which might be etyma or derived terms, but the exact relationship of which is unclear. This section should be formatted in a similar manner to derived terms.
Descendants (non-Egyptian words)
[edit]Descendants are words in other languages which come from the entry word. Most of these words will be Demotic or Coptic, but some Egyptian words entered Greek, Arabic, and even further afield. Please list descendants alphabetically by language using the {{desc}} template. Often it will be necessary to specify Coptic descendants by dialect (Akhmimic, Bohairic, Fayyumic, Sahidic, Old Coptic, etc.; see Wiktionary:About Coptic for a full list).
The references section should contain any dictionaries/lexicons which you used to create the entry. Please keep in mind that simply copying out of copyrighted works is a copyright violation and illegal; any entries found to be copyright violations will be promptly deleted without warning or discussion. Users with a repeated history of entering copyrighted material will generally be blocked.
m
- jackal
Declension of About Egyptian (masculine)
Alternative hieroglyphic writings of About Egyptian
m
- an official title of uncertain rank
Declension of About Egyptian (masculine)
Alternative hieroglyphic writings of About Egyptian
Manuel de Codage on Wikipedia.Wikipedia 
