En ”mer l. mindre stor” stor ordbok – om variationerna i SAOB:s omfång och ambitionsnivå

Resumé

The first section of The Swedish Academy Dictionary (SAOB), describing the Swedish language from 1521 to the present, was published already in 1893. When the dictionary is finished in a few years, it will comprise thirty-eight volumes. During this span of over 120 years, its level of ambition (and accordingly, its scope) has varied considerably. As shown in the paper, four periods can be distinguished: two periods (until c. 1920 and c. 1960–2002) when the ambition was to account for virtually all words and uses of words that were documented, and two periods (c. 1920–1960 and c. 2002 onwards) when quite strict rules of restriction steered the work. After summing up these rules, the paper gives examples of how the varying levels of ambition are reflected both in the selection of lemmas and in the (more or less exhaustive) way they are addressed.