About Idiomer

Idiomer is the evidence-first dictionary of expressions people actually use — idioms, proverbs, slang, and phrasal verbs — launching in English and Tiếng Việt, built for every language eventually.

Nói có sách, mách có chứng — “speak with books, report with evidence.” The proverb on our masthead is also the editorial policy.

What makes it different

• An entry is more than a definition. It carries its forms and variants, senses, literal gloss, register, region, era, connotation — and, as the platform grows, sources, review decisions, and disagreement.
• Statuses are honest. Attested means “in real, traceable use”; Community-reviewed and Editor-verified mean actual humans checked specific claims. We show the status instead of pretending everything is equally solid. Genuine disagreement (like the two competing forms of vắng chủ nhà, gà vọc niêu tôm) is preserved as Disputed, not silently resolved.
• Descriptive, not prescriptive. We say “used among Southern Vietnamese speakers” or “popularized via K-pop fandom,” not “correct” and “incorrect.” “Gen Z” is a usage cohort, not a dialect.
• Diacritics are sacred. Vietnamese tone marks distinguish words. Search works without them (an chao da bat), but the authored form is never rewritten, and exact accented matches always rank first.
• Meanings connect languages. Equivalents are typed — direct, near/cultural, paraphrase, literal translation, false friend — because “roughly the same idea” and “the same idiom” are different claims.

Content and licensing

Launch definitions and examples are original editorial content, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Examples are illustrative editorial examples and are labeled as such — they are not corpus attestations, and nothing here was scraped from commercial dictionaries. As community contribution opens, contributor content will use the same license with revision-level attribution.

Some proverb entries are adapted from Wikiquote: Vietnamese proverbs (CC BY-SA 4.0); each such entry carries its source note and remains at Candidate status until reviewed. The raw source snapshot and import code are preserved for auditability.

What’s next

In order: contributor accounts and the structured contribution wizard · per-claim evidence and citations · independent community review with variety-scoped reviewers · saved collections and spaced-repetition learning · public data exports. The roadmap favors a small collection that earns trust over a huge one that can’t.

Contact

Corrections, sources, regional knowledge, or partnership ideas: use the request form — every submission is read.