Ancient Library
Text reader in Learning
Recommended for its flawless Greek and Latin texts, click-to-parse words and attractive layout. Critics say it is barebones, buggy and needs polish, with unreliable translations.
Recommended for its flawless Greek and Latin texts, click-to-parse words and attractive layout. Critics say it is barebones, buggy and needs polish, with unreliable translations.
22 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 10
- criticize it
- 12
- approval share
- 45%
Recommended in 1 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 10 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.8 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 1 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Unreliable LLM translations
“Ancient Library is some vibecoded alternative that the LLM translation it uses will be incorrect.”
Comment from 8 Aug 2026 in “Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it” “translations seem a bit sketchy”
Comment from 7 Aug 2026 in “Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it” Buggy word parsing pop-up
“Apart from the UI around the word parsing pop-up being kind of buggy”
Comment from 8 Aug 2026 in “Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it” “it's not immediately obvious how to close a pop-up again”
Comment from 7 Aug 2026 in “Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it”
What people said
20 of the 24 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“I love all the Latin audio”
“it really falls down on the substance, which is the morphological tagging”
“the actual texts themselves seem to be given flawlessly”
“Apart from the UI around the word parsing pop-up being kind of buggy”
“macrons (diacritical marks for long vowels) have not been added to the text”
“And make it faster to load!”
“Ancient Library is some vibecoded alternative that the LLM translation it uses will be incorrect.”
“It's nice to see tools that simplify this process.”
“The Greek font is terrible—it's using the Modern Greek "acute" accent which looks weird”
“the vast amount of vocabulary makes managing a dictionary rather complicated”
“Is it not just Perseus with a wrapper?”
“very barebones implementation that needs a tremendous amount of polishing to be useful”
“it's not immediately obvious how to close a pop-up again”
“it's throwing me off how every V in the Latin texts show as U”
“sometimes you have to expand the entry to get to the meaning at all”
“Enclitic -que should _not_ be broken off as a separate word, though.”
“I guess this is a bit more attractively laid out”
“It's not really very useful in this particular case”
“Due to the formatting of word definitions, you have to go hunting for it in many cases.”
“translations seem a bit sketchy”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.