Deutsches Wörterbuch

The Brothers Grimm began their German dictionary in 1838 and the last volume appeared in 1961. It runs to 32 volumes.

Context

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm took on the dictionary in the late 1830s, aiming to record the history and use of German words with quotations from literature. The first volume appeared in 1854, and neither brother lived to finish the work, which reached only part of the alphabet in their lifetimes.

Generations of scholars carried it on. The final installment was published in 1961, giving the project a span of more than a century. It is bound as 32 volumes, with some counted as part-volumes.

The project was later digitized. A team at the University of Trier produced a searchable edition of all the volumes between 1998 and 2003, and the text is now available online through the Digital Dictionary of the German Language. A revised edition covering the early letters has since been developed, because language research had advanced greatly since the original.

The dictionary is still used by historians of the language because it quotes thousands of older sources, so it serves as both a reference work and a record of how German was written from the 1500s to the 1800s.