Goethe Dictionary

Goethe-Woerterbuch

The Goethe-Woerterbuch is a dictionary of individual linguistic meanings that presents Goethe’s entire vocabulary—approximately 90,000 entries—in alphabetical order and in word entries systematically organized by usage. It gives equal consideration to everyday language, diverse technical terminology, and the distinctive features of Goethe’s poetic language. This reference work—which has become indispensable not only for analyzing Goethe’s poetry but also as an aid to understanding all texts from the Classical to the Romantic periods—has already reached the last third of the alphabet.Anyone who wants to know how people spoke between the Rococo and Biedermeier periods about “humanity” and the “nation,” about the “public” and the “private,” about “politics” and “police,” and not least about “mob majesty” and “the theory of uproar,” will find what they’re looking for here. Clearly structured entries provide comprehensive information on the sometimes quite surprising aspects of meaning in the cradle of modern German; the findings are illustrated in a way that is both vivid and entertaining with original quotations, including some from the lesser-known areas of Goethe’s work.

The Goethe-Woerterbuch is an inter-academic project. In addition to Tübingen, research centers are located in Leipzig, supervised by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and in https://adw-goe.de/, which provides information about the Academy's research activities.research/research-projects-academy-program/Goethe-Woerterbuch/">Hamburg, overseen by the Lower Saxon Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, have been established since the project’s inception.

Goethe on Dictionaries

"The riding horses were nowhere to be seen; the large kitchen wagon, drawn by six sturdy horses, passed me by. I climbed aboard; it wasn’t entirely empty of provisions, but the kitchen maid was standing in the corner looking very disgruntled. I turned my attention to my studies. I had taken the third volume of Fischer’s Lexicon of Physics out of my suitcase; in such cases, a dictionary is the most welcome companion, where interruptions occur at any moment, and it then provides the best distraction by leading us from one topic to another.”

(Campaign in France. 1792)

In the beginning was the Word—in our case: the text, specifically a “Memorandum” by the Berlin classical philologist Wolfgang Schadewaldt. With his programmatic memorandum, he succeeded in late 1946 in convincing the German Academy of Sciences to dedicate to Germany’s most famous poet a dictionary of the author’s works—the very kind that had long been taken for granted for the leading figures of other national literatures.

Schadewaldt had specifically approached one of the academies of sciences, as he viewed them as the “cathedrals of research,” the only institutions he believed possessed the staying power required for such a project. Following the establishment of research centers in Berlin and Hamburg (1947), the Tübingen research center was founded in 1951 at Schadewaldt’s new chair. About three decades later, the Goethe-Woerterbuch project was incorporated into the Union (of the Academies) Program for long-term projects.

Structure of the Entries

A longer entry in the Goethe-Woerterbuch is typically structured into eight parts:

Keyword, Preliminary Remarks, Description of Meaning, Quotations, Source References, Information on Areas of Use, Information on Word Formation, Information on Synonyms.

The preface may include, among other things:

an outline of the article,
information on spelling, pronunciation, word form, government,
Information on frequency and distribution across text groups or meanings,
Information on the lexical field context,
Information on the history of the word or term,
Information on peculiarities or notable features of its usage in Goethe’s works.

The semantic section is hierarchically structured using alphanumeric section markers (I, A, 1, a, α) and may include, among other things:

Information on the lexical meanings, usually in the form of definitions, synonyms, or paraphrases,
information on contrasting words,
Information on meaning modifications specific to an individual, a work, a character, or a context, connotations, evaluations, perspectives, references,
Information on poetic linguistic features, e.g., imagery, symbolism, ambiguity, associativity,
information on conceptual and terminological usage.

Information on areas of use (e.g., anatomical, architectural, mining), stylistic patterns (e.g., epistolary style, official style), and stylistic values (e.g., humorous, coarse) usually appear in conjunction with the definitions.

The quotations serve to substantiate the respective meaning and, at the same time, to convey an idea of the variety of possible uses in different contexts. Illustrative quotations can also replace the explanation of meaning. Quotations and source references can often only be provided on a strictly selective basis.