A dictionary universe or the meta-dictionary

Conference item

A common challenge for the editing of historical and dialect dictionaries is the heterogeneity of the source material. The Norwegian Dictionary (Norsk Ordbok, NO2014) has the objectives to provide a scholarly and exhaustive account of the vocabulary of Norwegian dialects from 1600 to the present and of the written standard Nynorsk, and thus facing the heterogeneity in both dimensions.

More than ten years ago a meta-dictionary was proposed to tackle this heterogeneity. The original motivation was to create a common web based interface to the huge amount of lexicographic material digitized in the 1990ies. The meta-dictionary was later redesigned to become a pivot in the combined source database, text corpus and editing system for NO2014.

An entry in the meta-dictionary can be seen as a folder containing (pointers to), possibly commented, samples of word usage and word descriptions found in the linked sources. Each entry is labeled by normalized headword(s), word class information and the actual orthographical standard used.

The linked sources span old glossaries compiled in the 17th/18th centuries to modern dialects surveys and local dictionaries. A standard TEI-encoded text corpus spanning the period 1850 to present is gradually constructed. The results from corpus queries can be stored and linked to the meta-dictionary.

The meta-dictionary has proven to be a very useful tool in the practical editing of NO2014, and is currently being developed for an Old Norse project.

The meta-dictionary has in itself become a valuable repository. The old and the local dictionaries are kept in their original form as individual works expressing the language view of their time and author. The bidirectional linking in the system makes each headword in a source an entry point to the entire system (including NO2014), thus giving dialect users a unique opportunity to see their dialect in the larger context.

Authors: Ore, C

• Alternative title: Presented at Germanic Lexicography session
• Publication status: Not published
• Peer review status: Reviewed (other)
• Language: English
• Subjects: Lexicography