Plover theory
This page is about the stenographic theory. For the software, see Plover software.
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Plover is a free, open-source stenographic theory based on the personal dictionary of Mirabai Knight. It is the default dictionary that ships with Plover software, and contains more than 147,000 entries.
History
Knight attended New York Career Institute, a presently defunct stenography school, where students started with a 30,000 entry dictionary. The theory taught was similar to StenEd.
Over the course of school for 18 months, Knight added around 16,000 entries while doing offline captioning.
After graduation, Knight "folded in the 100,000-word StenEd dictionary, giving preference to my own dictionary where strokes disagreed." [1]
Knight continued to add more entries over the course of her career as an academic and event captioner, specializing in tech and medical terminology.
Primary Characteristics
Plover is considered to be a derivative of StenEd theory, and leans slightly towards being memory intensive.[2]
Through Knight's experience and expertise, Plover contains a lot of technical, medical, and scientific terminology.
Compared to other base theories, Plover is based on a professional stenographer's dictionary, so it contains many definitions for misstrokes, as well as entries based on rules that make sense to Knight personally. This can be an advantage, but could obstruct learning for those who rely on dictionary lookup over theory rules.
Acquisition
Plover theory is available for free. The easiest way to get the Plover dictionary is to download Plover software, where Plover theory is loaded by default in main.json.
Learning Resources
- See also: Stenography Textbooks
There are two primary textbooks available for free online to learn Plover theory from:
There are also resources designed to help practice Plover theory:
Plover's Default Dictionaries
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Plover software ships with Plover theory by default, and comes supplied with three dictionaries:
main.json. This contains the default dictionary. It is based on Mirabai Knight's own personal dictionary, which follows a StenEd-style theory. It contains over 140,000 entries and is adequate for anyone learning stenography. Mirabai uses this dictionary professionally for her realtime work.commands.json. This contains Plover Control Commands.user.json. This is available for your personal customization.user.jsonis a blank dictionary. By default, theuser.jsondictionary is at the top of the dictionary list and has the highest priority - it is the first dictionary Plover will use. When you define new strokes, they will get added to this dictionary. This means you can see which strokes you've defined yourself, instead of trying to locate them inside the default dictionaries.