What is Bitigçi?

In Old Turkic, bitigçi means “writer, scribe”; the word bitig at its base means book, while biti- means to write. The bitigçi, known to have served in the Imperial Council from the founding years of the Ottoman State, was the palace official who preserved law codes, imperial decrees and other important documents. When the sultan wanted to learn whether an imperial decree existed on a subject, or what information written documents and books contained about it, he consulted the bitigçi. The bitigçi examined all available sources and informed the sultan.

After the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent, as bitig fell out of use, bitigçi was replaced by its corrupted form beylikçi. The renowned lexicographer Şemseddin Sami Bey records in his monumental dictionary Kâmûs-ı Türkî that beylikçi is a corrupted form of bitigçi.

The culturally significant word bitigçi now lives on in a contemporary platform that records Turkish vocabulary, examines it through corpus evidence and makes contextual information traceable.

Strong Technology, Deep Knowledge

Bitigçi is developed on an infrastructure capable of processing large-scale Turkish data. Its dictionary, the continuously expanding T-BDLD corpus, contextual analyses and reference works operate as connected but independently maintained layers. Corpus processing, lemmatization, text cleaning, lexical discovery and live querying are carried out together without reducing the platform to a single model or a single method.

This infrastructure supports demanding natural-language processing tasks while keeping current dictionary entries, corpus attestations and contextual measurements available to users. As new texts enter the corpus, evidence and statistics are recalculated from the current data.

A Growing Corpus, A Deepening Dictionary

The knowledge base of Bitigçi is not a closed data set. Texts from books, articles, theses, news writing and other sources expand the corpus; new attestations strengthen or weaken lexical candidates, reveal new senses and update the distribution of existing words. Editorial decisions are therefore made by reading corpus evidence together with lexicographic principles and human review.

What Does It Offer?

Bitigçi brings together dictionary entries and senses, live corpus prevalence, inflected forms, collocations, context dynamics, domain and genre distributions, new-word and new-sense observations, the Bitigçi Encyclopedia, the Lexicography Terms dictionary and Computational Turkish Grammar. It lets users move from a word to its definition, from the definition to corpus attestations, and from attestations to the broader behaviour of Turkish.

Where Is Bitigçi Published?

Bitigçi is publicly available at bitigci.shakalin.net. Its dictionary, corpus and reference sections continue to be expanded and revised as the data grows and editorial review progresses.

The future of Turkological studies is being built through living data, explanatory dictionary writing and traceable contextual evidence. Bitigçi brings technology together with Turkish language and culture, making words, meanings and changing usages open to continuous observation.