The largest online dictionary in the world.
La Nación, Argentina 10/12/2003

The mastermind behind the world's largest online dictionary, which offers the meaning and translation of millions of words in 200 languages – all entirely free of charge is Chile-born Rodrigo Vergara.

The world’s largest online dictionary has been established thanks to language enthusiast, Chile-born Rodrigo Vergara – the mastermind behind the project. The dictionary offers free of charge the meaning and translation of millions of words in 200 languages, including several indigenous Latin American languages.
52-year-old Rodrigo Vergara told Reuters, "there is no such thing as a perfect dictionary, they all contain mistakes and no dictionary is complete. In my opinion, languages have no fixed boundaries and that's why our word factory just keeps growing and growing because it's people who create languages. The academic is convinced that languages are elastic and words changeable. An exile in Italy since 1974, the Chilean native set up the Logos Group in 1979. Thereafter began the long, meticulous and in some cases, thankless, task of working with words, establishing the company among the top ten ranked translation agencies in the world.

"I still have an old file in my desk drawer filled with faded, hand-written pages; it was one of those glossaries that translators used to compile a little at a time" said Vergara. A former student leader of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), son of a police officer and author of detective stories, a former lorry driver, entrepreneur and member of the Italian Manufacturers' Association, Vergara feels first and foremost a "man of culture". We invest part of our revenues in promoting culture. Logos posts revenues of more than 3 million dollars a year for translations and specialist publishing.
When he started to put together a 10-language database in 1988 "because we had reached the limit with our current technology", Vergara would never have imagined that he would later have been able to let users the world over access a truly singular, one-of-its-kind dictionary.

With the advent of the Internet which overcame all geographical boundaries, the Chile-born entrepreneur based in Modena decided to use this technology to do something that had seemed impossible just a few years earlier: a virtual and freely accessible dictionary in almost every language on the planet that can be added to by other people, i.e. building it together. The Logos Dictionary continues to grow thanks to its users who can choose to enter a term that is not found in the database. It is overseen by the Group's three thousand employees, located around the world, including 200 based in Modena and 30 Latin Americans.
The dictionary provides not just the meaning of words but also their translation in 200 different languages as well as examples of how they are used in literary contexts (more than 30,000 books in 113 languages), word sounds, conjugations, etymology with the option to read previously uploaded books on-screen. The site also offers a children’s dictionary with 320 key words in 135 languages (Aymara, Zulu, Guarani and Oromo amongst others), which youngsters can easily consult thanks to the drawings and recorded pronunciations. Giving equal space and "equal treatment" to all languages, experts at Logos have ultimately triggered a kind of linguistic revolution, challenging the unyielding view of the publishing industry which condemns many ethnic languages to oblivion. This great work, the dream of a word-enthusiast, is to be found at www.logos.net.