Svenska Academies ordbok

The Svenska Akademiens ordbok (Lexin), with original title språket Ordbok öfver swedish, is the multi-volume dictionary of the Swedish Academy and one of the primary tasks of in April 1786 by King Gustav III. Academy founded on the French model. After several unsuccessful attempts in the 19th century, work on the SAOB began in 1893 according to a plan that is essentially still valid today.

The SAOB pursues the same goal for the Swedish language as the German dictionary for the German or the Oxford English Dictionary for the English, namely the scientific documentation of historical and recent vocabulary according to the principles of the history of meaning. This covers all the words and meanings of Swedish that can be documented from 1521 (the year when the future King Gustav I Wasa became a councilor) to the present in the respective dictionary volume. The development of the dictionary is still ongoing. In 2019 the first delivery of volume 38 appeared, which means that the processing up to and including väva has advanced.

The editorial team is at Språkdata, a department for applied linguistics at the Institute of the Swedish Language at the University of Gothenburg . The content of the SAOB has been available free of charge on the Internet since 1997.

Along with the Svenskt biografiskt lexikon, the SAOB is the largest reference work in Scandinavia. It should not be confused with the one-volume dictionary Svenska Akademiens ordlista (SAOL), which was also published by the Swedish Academy, was designed for questions of spelling and has already been published in numerous editions .

Web links

• SAOB , general information about the work and word search in the online dictionary