Ian wrote:
to 116 volumes now ( http://www.libroantiguo.org/obr/euiea.htm ). This is not a good tactic. It has become historical in its own right.
You're right, of course. But it is still an impressive endeavour. Just like the pyramids: you can admire them without understanding what they are useful for.
The Swedish dictionary is bigger then the OED? A lot of words in the
The Swedish Academy was founded in 1786, modeled from the French Academy. Maybe their most important task today is awarding the Nobel prize for literature. But one of their first goals was to establish a complete dictionary of the Swedish language. However, they had to abandon their first plan, which was too unorganized. The first volume of the *current* project appeared in 1898, and a century later they are just finishing letter S - the 32nd volume. They plan to finish the alphabet by 2020. The entire contents is available online, free of charge, but covered by copyright, http://g3.spraakdata.gu.se/saob/
Of course, this is a pyramid. You cannot lookup "telefon", because they haven't done T yet. The article "automobil" was written in 1903 (http://g3.spraakdata.gu.se/osa/show.phtml?filenr=1/18/4608.html). Still, this is a good documentation of the historic use of written Swedish from 1521 (the reformation) until c. 1899. If you lookup the word Encyklopedi (http://g3.spraakdata.gu.se/osa/show.phtml?filenr=1/62/15725.html), you can see that it was first observed in written Swedish in 1758.
This 32+ volume work is named SAOB. There is also a 1 volume handbook called SAOL, which is currently in its 12th edition, and this is the spelling reference that all Swedish school teachers and newspaper journalists use. Then there are a few other Swedish multivolume dictionaries that are must-haves for any collector or library. But SAOB is the king. There will never again be anything so...eh, great.
suppose - probably ditto for the Swedish dictionary. American ditionary's usually will throw out old words, though our dictionaries are not really
A gardener has to balance between allowing growth and weeding/pruning. With the Internet and Moore's law, we have a much bigger garden.