LEO (meaning link everything online) is an internet site initiated by the computer science department of the Technische Universität München in Munich, Germany. It is well known for its software archive which mirrors several important open-source servers and its free online dictionaries.

Dictionaries

The website hosts three free online dictionaries and fora for extra language queries. The dictionaries are characterized by providing translations in forms of hyperlinks to further dictionary queries, thereby facilitating back translations. The dictionaries are partly extended and corrected by large vocabulary donations of individuals or companies, partly through suggestions and discussions on the respective LEO language fora.

Since April 1, 2006 the dictionaries have been run (in co-operation with Munich University) by the limited liability company Leo GmbH, formed from the members of the old Leo team.

English-German

The English-German dictionary run by Leo since 1995 contains more than 450,000 entries and receives an average of 7 to 9 million queries per day.

French-German

In 2004, a French-German dictionary was added to the site's services and has now more than 155,000 entries. This gets about 1 million queries a day.

Spanish-German

A Spanish-German dictionary with today more than 110,000 entries was introduced on April 1, 2006. It gets about 450,000 queries a day.

History

The site grew out of a network of FTP software and archived data which was put together by students at Munich University of Technology and Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich even before HTML and HTTP existed. The original aim was to create a single, huge archive by linking up archives run by the different research groups (hence its name link everything online). The archive was sorted thematically and the different sections organised and kept up to date by archivists.

When the World Wide Web came into common use, HTTP access to the archive was at first added as an alternative to FTP. Students developed various services in their free time, in specific the dictionaries.

Name

The name of the site is actually a backronym from the name Leo: the Bavarian coat of arms features a lion. Originally, the service was named ISAR (a backronym for Isar river, on the banks of which Munich is situated; here, ISAR is for Informationssysteme und Archiv München), but it had to be renamed as there was another firm of the same name.