Has it ever happened to you that you cannot read the beginning of a word in your Coptic manuscript because of a lacuna or fading ink? In that case, Coptic Dictionary Online and the regular expression explained in this post may be able to help you.

The “regular expression” (RegEx) is a special language for searching every sequence of letters on computers, and you can use regular expressions on Coptic Dictionary Online. In the case above, you can search all the candidates for completing the missing beginning just by adding “ .* ” (a dot and an asterisk) before the letters that you can read.

For example: your manuscript shows “ⲱⲧⲙ”, but the beginning of this word is not readable. In this case, you can enter “ .*ⲱⲧⲙ ” into the search box of Coptic Dictionary Online and obtain all the words which end with ⲱⲧⲙ. You can use this technique as an alternative to Strasbach/Barc's Dictionnaire inversé du copte.