Plena Ilustrita Vortaro de Esperanto is a monolingual dictionary of the languageEsperanto. It was first compiled in 1970 by a large team of Esperanto linguists and specialists under the guidance of Gaston Waringhien and is published by the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda. It may be consulted for free. The term "illustrated" refers to two features: 1 - The use of clipart-like symbols rather than abbreviations for certain purposes 2 - The occasional use of a line-art sketch illustrating the item being defined. These sketches are not used for most entries. The entries that do have a sketch are most commonly plants and animals, and sometimes tools.
History
Original publication
First published in 1970, the PIV has undergone two revisions to date and is considered by many to be something of a standard for Esperanto, thanks mainly to its unchallenged scope—15,200 words and 39,400 lexical units. However, it is also criticized as excessively influenced by the French language and politically biased. Moreover, its few and often outmoded illustrations appeared only as an appendix.
Supplement of 1987
In 1987, a supplement was separately published, produced under the guidance of Gaston Waringhien and Roland Levreaud. It covered approximately 1000 words and 1300 lexical units.
2002 and 2005 editions
In 2002, after many years of work, a new revised edition appeared with the title La Nova Plena Ilustrita Vortaro de Esperanto, also dubbed PIV2 or PIV2002. Its chief editor was Michel Duc-Goninaz. PIV2002 includes 16,780 words and 46,890 lexical units. Its illustrations are no longer located on the last pages, but rather are incorporated into the text itself. The edition was first presented to the SAT congress in Alicante, Spain in July 2002. The stock of 2000 printed books ran out in 2004, and a new edition, La Plena Ilustrita Vortaro Eldono 2005 with corrected typos and detailed modifications, appeared in March 2005. Bertilo Wennergren—a member of the Akademio de Esperanto, the group which attempts to define standards of good Esperanto usage—has compiled a 25,000-word critique of the 2002 and 2005 editions. One may note, for example, that the PIV still contains a Gallicism or two; Wennergren mentions that the PIV headword tamul/o is defined as one who belongs to an ethnic group in "Tamulio" and Sri Lanka, where words like tamilo and Tamilio, respectively, might have been preferable. He suggests that the "i" vowel in the second syllable is more internationally recognizable than "u", suggesting that the form tamulo is supported only in the French wordtamoul, but the PIV does not include a headword tamil/o or even list it as a synonym.
2020 edition
The last traditionally printed edition of the book will appear in the year 2020, the 50th anniversary of the PIV. After that it is planned to permanently update the website of the project and to offer a Print on demand edition of the book based on the latest version of the website.
PIV online
In August 2010, it was announced that SAT reached an agreement with the educational organizationE@I to convert the PIV into an online searchable version. The SAT, which previously put off a PIV electronic edition out of fear of undercutting the market for the paper version, is donating the rights to use the PIV text free of charge. However, E@I estimated that the conversion process will cost a minimum of 10,000 euros, which would need to be contributed by Esperanto organizations and individual Esperantists. Although at the beginning of 2011, the fundraising efforts had yet to reach the halfway point, several large donations pushed the vortaro.net fund to 13,540 euros by April 14, 2011 and E@I reported work on the online PIV was underway. On April 4, 2012, a beta version of the online PIV system was made available to the public for testing. In the first half of 2020 the website vortaro.net was one of the most popular sources in Esperanto Wikipedia.
