Dictionaries

Dictionary of Contemporary Dutch

The Dictionary of Contemporary Dutch (Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek or ANW) is an online monolingual dictionary covering the period from 1970 until now. It describes the general Dutch language in the Netherlands, Flanders, Suriname and the Caribbean. Its focus is on written language. In 2009, the first ANW words were published online and the dictionary is updated every day. The ANW is an interactive dictionary. Additions and corrections are processed on a regular basis and comments from users are warmly welcomed.

Description of the vocabulary

The Dutch Language Institute (INT) describes the Dutch vocabulary on the basis of large amounts of source material. When compiling historical dictionaries, the researchers describe what the historical source material shows, without making any value judgements. That would be difficult to do anyway, given that in previous centuries there was no such thing as a standard language, let alone spelling rules. For contemporary dictionaries, the content of the sources is of course described as well, but deviations from the current spelling rules are always mentioned explicitly. What determines the meanings of words?

The meanings of words are determined by the context in which they occur. By going through the material and studying a word in various contexts, the meaning profile of the word at hand will become clear, and the dictionary editor will be able to provide it with an adequate description. For some historical material, this process is complicated by the fact that certain words and meanings, although we know that they must have existed at some point, have not been passed on, causing gaps in the descriptions.

When it comes to contemporary material, on the other hand, we need to be always on the lookout for new meanings and uses of words. As such, a dictionary of contemporary Dutch is never really finished, and needs constant updating. Material and selection

The material that serves as the basis of the dictionaries is taken from a selection of texts that date from the relevant period and are as varied as possible. Relatively little material was saved from the very early periods. This is why the material for the Dictionary of Old Dutch consists of simply anything that could be collected. The same goes for the Early Middle Dutch Dictionary. For the Dictionary of the Dutch Language and the Dictionary of Contemporary Dutch a selection had to be made from the available sources, or there would have been too much material. For these dictionaries, an optimal balance was strived for between words taken from literature, newspapers, specialist books, and so on. Description in clusters

Based on this material, which is called a corpus, a list is made of all words that qualify to be described in the dictionary. The length of this list depends on the pre-established size of the dictionary. It is this list that the editors of the dictionary start working on. Previously, many dictionaries were published in printed parts, making it necessary to work on the vocabulary in alphabetical order. Thanks to digitization, this is no longer necessary. The relatively small dictionaries of Old Dutch and Early Middle Dutch have been edited in clusters in which related words were described alongside each other, even if they were far apart alphabetically. This method is far more efficient for the editor, and provides the user with a more uniform result. This approach has been copied for the Dictionary of Contemporary Dutch, which is daily updated with newly edited words. Available for research

Researchers have the option of using both our dictionaries and our corpora for their own research. By using the extensive search options available in the dictionary applications, they can pose almost any research question. Most corpora are accessible for scientific research as well. In addition to the text material itself they contain other information, such as, in most cases, the date and geographical origin of the text, plus a specification of word class, morphological parsing and combinatory patterns.