What does this word mean?

A dictionary tells you what a word means in the language you already knew it was in. That is not the situation most people are in with Philippine languages — usually you have a word and are not certain which language it came from, and the risk is that it means something perfectly ordinary in two of them.

Sira is a fish in Bikol and Pangasinan, and broken or spoiled in Tagalog and Cebuano. Aso is a dog in Tagalog and smoke in Cebuano. Wala is the direction left across the Visayan languages and means nothing at all in Tagalog. None of those announce themselves as ambiguous.

Two sources, because neither answers the question alone. The parallel phrase set of 287 concepts gives what a word means in each language that uses it. A separate table of 46 documented collisions gives the senses that diverge dangerously — including words the phrase set does not reach.

Paste more than one word and it switches to checking a passage, reporting only the words that can be read two ways. It deliberately does not highlight everything it recognises: a tool that marks half the sentence teaches nothing.

Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you paste is sent anywhere.

• It knows everyday vocabulary and nothing else. Proper nouns, place names and specialised terms are not in it.
• An empty result means we have no record of the word, not that it is not a word.
• The collision list is what we have documented, not everything that exists. A clean scan is not a guarantee.
• Meanings come from compiled reference and are pending review by native speakers, except the Ilocano and Tagalog columns which are separately cited.

The whole set is downloadable under CC BY-SA 4.0 if you would rather check it yourself.

• Not sure which language your text is in? Identify it.
• Want one concept across every language? Browse by meaning.
• Want the traps for one specific pair? Cebuano–Tagalog, Hiligaynon–Tagalog, Waray–Tagalog.