To browse the dictionary, click on a respective letter to get a list of all the words starting with this letter. Characters which exist in Nganasan, but never occur at the beginning of words are displayed, but cannot be clicked.
Choose a word from the alphabetical list displayed for every letter to see a profile of this word. The profile will appear in a pop-up. This profile might include additional morphological information on the word, will display Russian and English translations should they exist, and will show all subentries and example sentences associated with the respective word.
To search the dictionary, enter your query into the text field and click submit. Latin queries will be transcribed into the Russian and/or Nganasan variant of the Cyrillic alphabet, depending on the search parameters. The transcription schemes are shown below.
It is also possible to get Nganasan or Nenets special characters using the standard Russian keyboard layouts. To do this, place a colon (":") after a standard character to get a modified version of this character. "н:" becomes "Ӈ", "у:" becomes "ӱ", et cetera.
The options to the right of the search field are:
The search results will be displayed in tabular form. The user can click on any Nganasan lexeme to get the word's profile. Additional information on the word and where it can be found, will be displayed underneath the lexeme.
To the left of some lexemes, you will see the clickable symbol [+]. When this symbol is clicked, all subentries and example sentences associated with an entry will appear. Click [-] beside a lexeme to make these subentries disappear again.
You can use wildcards when searching the dictionary. The underscore, "_", is used to represent a single unknown character and the percent symbol "%" zero or more characters. The query "ӈ_рми" will find both "ӈарми" and " ӈирми". The query "%ими" will find all entries ending with the characters "ими", as well as the word "ими" itself. Be careful with wildcards, however, as overly liberal searches can give you too many results.
It is possible to use the search function using any Latin or Cyrillic keyboard. As mentioned above, the safest way to get a Nganasan special character is to put a colon (":") after the character which bears the closest resemblance to the Nganasan letter. There are, however, often other methods, which are shown in the table below.
The transcription algorithm is quite flexible – different methods can be used to get the same character.
| Nganasan | Input (Latin) | Input (Cyrillic) |
| а | a | а |
| б | b | б |
| г | g | г |
| д | d | д |
| е | e, je | е |
| з | z | з |
| Ӡ | z:, th | з: |
| и | i, ji, 'i | и |
| i1 | i | и: |
| й | j | й |
| ʔ | q, ", '' | ", '' |
| к | k | к |
| л | l | л |
| м | m | м |
| н | n | н |
| ӈ2 | ng, n: | нг, н:, ҥ, ң |
| о | o | о |
| ӧ | o:, ö | ё, о:, ө |
| п | p | п |
| с | s | с |
| т | t | т |
| у | u | у |
| ӱ | u:, ü | у:, ү |
| х | h, x | х |
| ч | ch, č, tsh, tš | ч |
| ы | y, õ | ы |
| ь | ' | ь |
| ә | y:, ä, e: | э, ы: |
| ю | ju | ю |
| я | ja | я |
1: "i" only appears after с, н, д or т in Nganasan. These letters have palatalized and non-palatalized variants, where "и" is used after the palatalized variants and "i" after the non-palatalized variants. After these letters, the palatalized consonant must be marked in some manner. If it is not, the software will assume that the consonant is not palatalized, and will place an "i" after it. "ni" will be transcribed as "нi"; one can write either "ńi", "n'i" or "nji" to get "ни". After all other consonants, "i" will always be transcribed as "и".
2: Note that one must write "ngg", "n:g", "нгг" or "н:г" if one wishes to obtain the character combination "ӈг".
Some examples of how one could find a certain Nganasan word: