The Online Blissword Dictionary was created by Leona Westland as part of an MSc course in Applied Computing at the University of Dundee, Scotland. The project was completed between May and September 2003 and was conducted under the supervision of Dr Annalu Waller.

Blissymbolics is a semantic based graphic language developed by Charles K. Bliss and is used world-wide to facilitate groups of non-speaking individuals in communication. The language, which is similar to written Chinese, is meaning-based. This means that the Bliss-characters and Bliss-words are graphic representations of the concept behind words rather than being a phonetic representation of spoken language. This makes the language easier to learn than traditional orthography (writing).

Currently, all Blissymbolic software that has been developed represents Bliss-words as whole Bitmap pictures rather than representing the separate Bliss-characters individually. This means that several representations of the same Bliss-character are being stored dependent upon how many Bliss-words they exist in.

The long term goal of this website implementation is to represent Bliss-characters and Bliss-words as a True Type font. This will facilitate a greater manipulation of the language than current bitmap representations. Due to the font not yet being available, it was possible to create an intermediate solution. Rather than encoding the dictionary with full Bliss-words, it was possible to identify a common set of Bliss-characters that existed in many words. After identifying these characters, it was necessary to decompose existing Bliss-word bitmaps to represent the singular Bliss-characters.

By encoding the dictionary with single Bliss-character bitmaps, it will be possible in the future to switch the Bliss-character bitmaps for the Bliss-character font without a lot of re-work.

Another goal of this dictionary website is to provide an arena of information where people can learn about Blissymbolics, including the history of the language, how to make Bliss-words and be able to search the dictionary for the spelling of Bliss-words.