Från Svenska ord (Lexin) 3 till Svenska ord 4

Resumé

In the late 1970s, the Swedish Board of Education started the LEXIN project (LEXIN=Lexikon för invandrare, ‘Dictionaries for immigrants’). The purpose was to produce lots of Swedish-L2 dictionaries, where L2 represents immigrant languages for which no commercial publishing houses could be expected to engage in dictionarymaking. These bilingual dictionaries were to be based on a common Swedish dictionary and database, Svenska ord (‘Swedish words’). This monolingual dictionary, with slightly less than 20,000 lemmas, was compiled at the Department of Computational Linguistics at the University of Gothenburg, under the direction of Martin Gellerstam. Its first edition was published in 1984. The LEXIN project was a great success; today, more than 20 immigrant languages are provided with bilingual dictionaries based on Svenska ord. The project has inspired similar projects in Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. In the 1990s, an Internet version of all the LEXIN dictionaries was published, as well as extended editions of Svenska ord. In 2008–2010, an updated and extended version of Svenska ord (Svenska ord 4) was developed at the Centre for Lexicology and Lexicography at the University of Gothenburg. It was published in 2011, connected to the website of the Swedish Board of Language Planning, now responsible for the LEXIN project. In the paper, the improvements of Svenska ord 4 are described, not least in relation to the intense metalexicographic discussion of lexicographic functions in recent years. In particular, the excellent search possibilities of Svenska ord 4 are underlined (made possible thanks to work performed at KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm).