This is about when you can’t find the meaning of a word because the free dictionary doesn’t have it or is wrong. This will happen more and more as you read in Icelandic. Part of it is because English is a much more specific language, like how we have many words with very similar meanings that can still only be used in certain situations (“close” versus “shut”, for example), and Icelandic simply is a lot more vague. I have many examples of this, but most wouldn’t make sense to a native English speaker (such as “why is a knitted jacket called a jacket and not a sweater”?). The other part is just that no good Icelandic-English dictionary actually exists, and many Icelanders don’t know English so fluently that they always know the correct differences between all of our confusing words, so you get wrong translations because of that too.

The last part is just that in some cases we have taken Icelandic words and changed the meanings in English, and sometimes people on both sides aren’t aware there are differences. “Saga” is an example, in English it means “a very long story, especially fiction and of heroic achievement” but in Icelandic it can just mean any story or history. Sometimes this kind of mistake comes from English borrowing an Icelandic word and using it to mean something much more specific than it actually is in Icelandic. Sadly, these sorts of mistakes also exist in the Icelandic-English dictionaries.

Many of you probably use the free online dictionary, but the more you read in Icelandic the more words you’ll find that have incorrect or missing meanings. This may happen if you take a class too, as I’ve had multiple teachers who gave us the wrong definitions (teachers mixing up “blood-brother” and “foster-brother” was common for example, but those two things are very different in English!). So what do you do when you realize your word isn’t in the dictionary, or the listed definitions seem to have something missing?

The first thing I do is search for the word on Icelandic Wikipedia and Wiktionary. They often have translations to English or descriptions in Icelandic that help a lot. At the same time, I scan Google results of the word to see if the definitions that the Wiki sites give me make any sense. Sometimes their definitions aren’t any help or they don’t even have a definition, so then I take a closer look at the Google results, read the context that people are using the word in, and check to see if this site has any example sentences. If it seems like a lot of older results are coming up in Google or on that site, like if I’m getting a lot of results from timarit.is‘ archived newspapers, then I look for it in the Old Icelandic dictionary to see if that can shed any light on things.

Here is an example word that I had to look up:
Flauel: The free dictionary says it means “corduroy”. Searching on Google and Wiki for something like “flauel meaning” got me “velvet” and “velour”. But those three things are all different, so I had to keep looking for more exact information. Going onto Google’s image search, you don’t get many photos and most of them aren’t clear enough to tell if it’s corduroy (which is ribbed velvet), velvet, or velour (which is another fabric like velvet) most of the time.

Sometimes you can find a similar-looking word, especially in older examples where they might have just taken it from another language instead of Iceland-ifying it (ex. fløiel, fløyl, flöyel, and fløyel) and then you can look up the meaning in those other languages. However often you can’t be certain that it’s actually the same word, that it has the same meaning(s) today or in Icelandic, or that the definition you find for the other language is even correct.

I couldn’t find anything definite online so I looked it up in my Icelandic-Icelandic dictionary, which said:
flauel: hk. þéttofið fataefni með loðið (flosað) yfirborð öðrum megin, slétt eða rifflað (flauelsbuxur / kragaflauel)
mjög snöggt og þétt flauel, bómull í uppistöðu og ívafi
silki í loðnu (spegilflauel)

(This is my translation of the above entry:)
Neuter gender. Tightly-woven clothing material with hairy (nappy) surface on one side, smooth or ribbed (corduroy trousers / kragaflauel)
very close-clipped and dense flauel, mainly cotton and wefted(?)
silk with nap (spegilflauel)

Ívaf was another tricky word because it appears to mean some different things if you Google, such as embedding something online, something in cooking, and something in weaving. But the online dictionary only mentions it means a weft, so as you can see that’s also missing at least two definitions. I also couldn’t figure out what kragaflauel or spegilflauel meant, because even though I know the meanings of both parts of the compound word it just doesn’t make any sense to me, and I don’t get many Google results.

Sometimes these things seem really confusing until you actually know the answer or until you take a break and come back a day later, and then they seem so simple you wonder how you never got it. This is also a tactic you can use sometimes when trying to figure out a word – just take a break for a day or two.

Here are some more places I found flauel:
Rauðar flauels bollakökur – red velvet cupcakes (this came up when I searched for the word alone)
Flauelsgrautur – velvet pudding (I found this in an Icelandic cookbook of mine but there seem to be recipes online too, including translated ones)
Silkiflauel – I found this in some old advertisements, but it’s also used here. I still don’t know what this means exactly.

This is an ad from March of 1940, you can see that they’re calling velour chiffon “flauel”.

My conclusion is that flauel can be either velvet or velour but is most often velvet. Corduroy is often “rifflað flauel” (ribbed velvet/velour) in the Google results and could also be “rifjavoð – ribbed fabric” according to the High Icelandic Language Center but if I were to agree with that last one then we’d be under a lot more confusion because there are tons and tons of different types of ribbed fabric that we have specific names for in English. Based off Google results some people are using flauel to actually mean corduroy, and “órifflað (unribbed) flauel” to mean velvet. But overall, flauel seems to most commonly mean velvet with velour being the secondary meaning, and it’s just that some outlying meanings exist – maybe from people not knowing exactly how to translate things or without knowing the existing terms well themselves. What do they use to mean specifically velour? I don’t know, but hopefully someone can tell me so I can learn!

When you can’t figure anything out or are still confused, that’s when we need to pool our resources. Ask around and see if anyone has an Icelandic friend who can help, ask on this blog in comments, and ask on forums online. You should also save the word (or phrase) somewhere and check on it again later when you know more Icelandic, as well as collect examples of the usage of it so you can either eventually figure it out yourself or make it easier on the other person when they try to help you. I can usually figure out the meaning of a word after trying the various techniques in this post, but I can’t often figure out the differences in word usage between similar words unless it’s similar to as in English.

Krem is an example of this. In Icelandic it seems to only be used in certain ways and the free dictionary makes no note of this. It lists rjómi (which actually means plain cooking cream apparently, such as regular cooking cream or plain sour cream) and then krem (which means “a soft cream made out of a combination of things, usually in cooking or medicine” such as paste, toothpaste, ointment, salve, or frosting) as having the exact same meanings, that is to say, just “cream”. That’s incorrect because, for example, you cannot call toothpaste (tannkrem) or frosting (krem, but it can be called other things too) “cream” in English. Similarly, if it’s cooking cream mixed with something (ex. chocolate and coffee), in Icelandic you have to use “krem” for the resulting mixture and not “rjómi”, even if in English we might call it something like “chocolate and coffee-flavoured cream”. You can see examples of this if you look at these “krem recipes”. Note that even if they use rjómi is an ingredient the name of the actual recipe uses krem, and they don’t have to have cooking or sour cream in them for the recipe name to say krem either.

A similar problem occurs with heldri, where it seems to mean something like “main/more important”, but you can see what the free dictionary describes it as:
O mínus blóð þarf að vera tiltækt á skurðstofum, neyðarmóttökum og helstu sjúkrastofnunum úti á landi.
(loosely) O-minus blood needs to be on-hand in operating rooms, emergency rooms, and the major medical centers in the country.
Sjúkrastofna – a room for bedridden, ill people inside a hospital, clinic, sickbay, school nurse station, etc.

In the type of Icelandic I read, I noticed that heldri was used a lot more infrequently than other words that supposedly meant the same thing, so I wanted to know why. In the end, for both heldri and krem I had to collect examples and then try asking as many people as I could find about them until I had some idea of when they’re really used.

Recently I’ve learned that if possible, you should just use an Icelandic-Icelandic dictionary and have the free Icelandic-English dictionary, plus the problem-solving methods above, as a supplement for when you can’t understand entries in the Icelandic-Icelandic one. They usually have tons more definitions than the Icelandic-English ones, and sometimes the definitions are a lot clearer than what you or your friends can figure out. For example, my dictionary had clear meanings for both krem and heldri even though I couldn’t find such things anywhere else. I use this dictionary, which has about 94,000 definitions and was a lot cheaper and smaller than the only other one in the store that had that many. When I bought it they also gave me a coupon for four months free of the Snara.is online dictionaries, which are the best online dictionaries for Icelandic, but I can’t tell you if this is a normal, long-time deal or if you’d get a coupon if you buy the dictionary through the internet either.

Lastly, I have a tumblr that I am starting here for words that were/are difficult to figure out. It has only just been made, but once I fix it up a little and post the few words that I have I’ll open it up so anonymous people can submit words, examples, or definitions too. I’m very busy right now so it might not be extremely soon that I do this, but I hope it’s of use to someone and I hope you all can help me out too.