Official Swedish dictionary is complete after 140 years

  26 October 2023    Read: 841
Official Swedish dictionary is complete after 140 years

The final recording of the Swedish language has been completed after 140 years, with the final volume of the dictionary sent to press last week, according to KOHA, the world's first free and open source library system.

The Swedish Academy Dictionary has 33,111 pages in 39 volumes.

"It started in 1883 and now we have finished. For 137 years, full-time workers have worked on it," publisher Christian Mattsson told AFP.

Although it has come a long way, the work on it is not quite finished: the A-R volumes are now so old that they need to be revised to include modern words.

"One such word is the word 'allergy' which came into the Swedish language around the 1920s but is not in volume A because it was published in 1893".

"Barbie doll", "app" and "computer" are among 10,000 words to enter the dictionary in the next seven years.


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