Reuse the texts

Every prayer printed here, as data you can build on, and a small script that links prayer names on your own pages to the edition they come from.

The whole corpus as one file

/corpus/prayers.json holds all 69 texts in 89 editions, across 5 languages. Each edition carries its words line by line, the edition it comes from, its rights basis, the way it was checked and a link to the record of that check, and the form it should be cited in. It also carries the 5 texts a check held back, each with both readings and the exact character where they part, because the texts that were refused are part of the evidence for the ones that were not.

It is built from the same publication gate as these pages, so it can never offer a text the site does not print. Fetch it whenever you like: it is a static file, served with permission for any site to read it.

What you may do with it

Each edition states its own rights, and those govern its reuse, because one licence for the whole file would be false for some of it. Most editions are in the public domain and may be reused freely. The Qur’an text is Tanzil’s and licensed: copy it verbatim, name Tanzil as the source and link tanzil.net. Where an edition was retrieved through another library, the file says so, and that library should be credited as it asks: the vocalized Hebrew came via Sefaria.org.

Please carry the claim with the text. Every text here was checked against a second independent witness and published only where both agreed. That is a claim about wording. No person has checked any of it, and nobody credentialed in the tradition has chosen any of it for any situation. A reuse that drops that sentence makes a stronger claim than this site does. Rights and permissions has the rest.

A linker for your own pages

Add one line to a page and the first mention of a prayer on it becomes a link to that prayer here, where the words are printed from a named edition with the check they passed:

<script src="https://makeaprayer.com/linker.js" defer></script>

It knows 112 prayer names, the same ones this site links in its own prose, and it follows the same rules. Proper names only: a name written with a capital is linked, and the same word in lowercase is left alone, because “rosary beads” is not a citation. The first mention on a page, never every one. Never inside a link, a heading, code, a form or a button.

To limit it to one part of the page, give it a container: data-root="#article". To keep it away from a particular element, add data-makeaprayer-skip to that element.

What it does on your page, completely: one request for a small list of names, then it reads your text and turns matching names into ordinary links. It sets no cookies, stores nothing, and sends nothing anywhere. It only ever writes links to this site’s prayer pages, and it builds them as elements rather than as HTML, so nothing in the list can inject anything into your page. Read it before you add it: /linker.js is short and commented.

Why this exists

A text that is easy to copy and hard to cite loses its source within a few hops. Sefaria, the library this site’s Hebrew comes from, made its corpus reusable and asked only to be credited, and other sites now carry its citations for it. This is the same arrangement at the size of a prayer anthology: take the words, and take where they came from with them.