de Gruyter Dictionaries

De Gruyter is one of the leading publishers of academic dictionaries, with a strong focus in the field of German vocabulary and the history of the German language. Mouton de Gruyter complements these publications with works of reference relevant to other fields of linguistics.

Among Mouton’s most popular dictionaries is the Reverse English Dictionary (by Gustav Muthmann) which looks at words "from behind", considering their structure and comparing their endings. In so doing, the Reverse English Dictionary reveals the variety of the English language as well as new and unaccustomed aspects of word-formation.

A Valency Dictionary by Thomas Herbst et al. is a unique reference work with no comparable publication on the market. It provides a valency description of English verbs, nouns and adjectives. Each entry contains a comprehensive list of the complementation patterns identified on the basis of the largest corpus of English available at the present time.

Mouton’s Hittite Etymological Dictionary (by Jaan Puhvel), a compendium of one of the great languages of the Ancient Near East, has proved to be a reference work of paramount importance to all linguists specializing in comparative Indo-European linguistics. So far, six volumes covering the first half of the alphabet (A-M) have been published, complete with indices to comparands in other languages which open up the Hittite Etymological Dictionary to other philologies. In a similar manner, Werner Winter’s A Bantawa Dictionary, the most voluminous of all English dictionaries of the Rai languages, is an important research tool for specialists in Kiranti languages as well as for scholars of Tibeto-Burman languages and Nepal studies in general.

De Gruyter’s works of reference to the German language include the well-known Kluge, the definitive etymological dictionary of the German language, and the Dornseiff, which lists vocabulary by subject area and can be used as a complete up-to-date base to onomasiological studies, as well as, a dictionary of synonyms. The recently published Variantenwörterbuch des Deutschen / Dictionary of German Variants (edited by Ulrich Ammon et al.) contains approximately 12,000 words and usages of standard language with nationally- or regionally-limited distribution, or differences in usage including their standard German equivalents.

A treasure trove for practitioners as well as for linguists interested in special-language research, de Gruyter’s English-German/German-English Marketing-Wörterbuch / Marketing Dictionary (by Wolfgang J. Koschnick) gives for each marketing term its current translation as well as a short definition and/or explanation.

In addition to these, we publish multi-volume encyclopaedias of historical German vocabulary: the renowned Frühneuhochdeutsches Wörterbuch (The Dictionary of Early High German; edited by Ulrich Goebel and Oskar Reichmann), the Chronologisches Wörterbuch des deutschen Wortschatzes (The Chronological Dictionary of German Vocabulary; edited by Elmar Seebold), the Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch (The Old High German Dictionary; edited by Jochen Splett), and the Seibicke, (Das Historische deutsche Vornamenbuch - the encyclopaedia of historical German first names).

We offer authoritative, lexicologically-edited information of 20th century German language, revised and arranged by the leading academics in their fields. Among our notable dictionaries are Deutsches Fremdwörterbuch (The Dictionary of Foreign Words in German; newly revised by the Institut für deutsche Sprache), the Anglizismen-Wörterbuch (The Dictionary of English Words in German; edited by Broder Carstensen and Ulrich Busse) and a number of specialised dictionaries (e.g. Schlagwörter der Nachkriegszeit (Vocabulary of the Post-War Era) by Dieter Felbick, Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus (Vocabulary of the National Socialists) by Cornelia Schmitz-Berning, and Sprache in der DDR (Language of the GDR) by Birgit Wolf).

The dictionaries of de Gruyter and Mouton are well-known for their high quality in content and presentation. They are indispensable tools for linguistic studies and provide important sources of information for specialist linguists as well as anyone interested in languages, particularly the semantics and history of German.