Where Kịrịkẹnị’s words come from

Almost every headword on Kịrịkẹnị can be traced to a single document: the Okrika Word Book, which its compiler Levi Sika titled Kịrịkẹnị Ọkụẹịngbọlụ Diri. He finished it in June 1995. It runs to nearly five thousand entries, each with its tone marks, part of speech and an English gloss, and many with notes on usage, synonyms and the occasional proverb.

Sika was clear about who the book was for. Not foreign scholars, but Okrika people whose English had overtaken their Kịrịkẹ, whose "limited vocabulary tends to run down in their stock of expression". He wrote that the speech of the island town was the common standard every Okrika person could understand, while Ogu and Ogoloma kept more of the old words.

Who helped him

His preface names a long list of helpers: chiefs, clergy and members of the Okrika Bible Translation Project; Mr George J. Orupabo on phonology; and, as editorial consultants, Professor Kay Williamson, Professor E. J. Alagoa and Dr Charles E. W. Jenewari. He also drew on the Okrika Gospels, W. W. Peters’ Okrika Primer and his own earlier book, Tatari Go Diri.

He planned eight appendices, from a glossary of obsolete words to the counting system and the talking instruments. They were never typed, and have not been found.

Rescued in 2005

The typescript survived among the papers left by Kay Williamson. In May 2005 the linguist Roger Blench, charged with seeing her manuscripts published, circulated it from Cambridge. He noted that it had been typed onto a Macintosh without proofreading, then converted to an IBM Word file. He corrected the English, added scientific names, cross-references and etymologies, and moved the text from the phonetic fonts IPA Kiel and SIL Doulos to Times New Roman, warning that "some conversions were uncertain".

Rebuilt in 2026

Those uncertain conversions are the reason the dictionary could not simply be copied and pasted onto a website. The dot under ẹ ị ọ ụ ḅ ḍ was stored as an invisible character from an old font. Some tone marks survived only as stray symbols such as $, @ and ^.

To build Kịrịkẹnị, every page of the 2005 PDF was read by the position of each column, so that headword, part of speech, subject code and gloss could not run into one another. The invisible dots were restored, and the stray symbols were decoded using Sika’s own pronunciation key: in his examples, a dollar sign after a vowel stands for the dot, and a dollar sign or at-sign on a syllabic m or n stands for a low or high tone. The handful of entries that still could not be read with confidence are flagged for review rather than guessed.

What that means for you

When two sources disagree, Kịrịkẹnị follows Sika. When you find something that looks wrong, it may be a mistake in the 1995 typescript, in the 2005 conversion, or in our reading of it, and we want to know. Suggest a correction on the Contribute page and an editor will look at it against the source.