Afri-Dict

Dataset Summary

afri-dict is a bilingual dictionary dataset for four major African languages: Hausa, Igbo, Swahili, and Yoruba. Entries include a headword, part-of-speech tag, and definition in English or the target African language. This dataset can serve as a foundational resource for machine translation systems, language learning tools, spell checkers, cross-lingual search, and other NLP applications for African languages.

Languages

The dataset is organized into subsets by language. Note that the headword language in the word field varies by subset.

ISO Code	Language	Size (Entries)	Mapping Direction
hau	Hausa	4,920	English ↔ Hausa
ibo	Igbo		Igbo ↔ English
swh	Swahili	9,760	English ↔ Swahili
yor	Yoruba	12,200	Yoruba ↔ English

Dataset Structure

Data Fields

• word: This is the headword or source term.
• pos: Part of speech for the headword.
• definition: The equivalent word or an explanatory definition in the target language. In some cases, multiple synonyms are provided, separated by commas.

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

# Load specific language
hausa = load_dataset("taresco/afri-dict", "hau")
swahili = load_dataset("taresco/afri-dict", "swh")

# Access the first entry
print(hausa['train'][0])
print(swahili['train'][0])

Citation Information

If you use this dataset in your research or project, please cite it as follows:

@misc{taresco2025afri-dict,
  author = {The African Research Collective},
  title = {Afri-Dict},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  howpublished = {\url{[https://huggingface.co/datasets/taresco/afri-dict](https://huggingface.co/datasets/taresco/afri-dict)}}
}