About the Swedish Academy Dictionary

Everyone with an interest in languages and words can enjoy the Swedish Academy Dictionary but it is principally geared to linguists, historians, genealogists and others that require help with the reading of ancient texts.

The nearest parallels to the Swedish Academy Dictionary are the Oxford English Dictionary, Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch and Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, the first-named being the closest equivalent.

Like these works the Swedish Academy Dictionary is a lexical record of a long period of linguistic development down to the present day. All are combinations of a contemporary dictionary and a large number of dictionaries of earlier stages of the language. The Swedish Academy Dictionary looks back as far as the stage where Swedish becomes recognisably modern.

Another feature which all these historical dictionaries have in common is that morphological variations and the explanations of the meanings are illustrated by authentic quotations. The Swedish Academy Dictionary has in its collections 9 million quotations on slips. The quotations derive from about 20 000 different sources like fiction and non-fiction, periodicals, accounts, estate inventories, reports of court proceedings and so on from 1521 until today.