The ''Thesaurus Linguae Latinae'' (abbreviated as ''ThLL'' or ''TLL'') is a monumental dictionary of

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

founded on historical principles. It encompasses the Latin language from the time of its origin to the time of

Isidore of Seville Isidore of Seville (; 4 April 636) was a Spania, Hispano-Roman scholar, theologian and Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Seville, archbishop of Seville. He is widely regarded, in the words of the 19th-century historian Charles Forbes René de Montal ...

(died 636). The project was founded in 1894 by Eduard Wölfflin and the first fascicle was published in 1900. At the time, the researchers thought it would take up to 20 years to complete the thesaurus. Today, it is expected that the work will be completed around the year 2050. The last fascicle of the P-volume appeared in 2010, and as of 2025 the work is under way on N and R. The institution that carries out the work of the dictionary is located in

Munich Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, Germany. As of 30 November 2024, its population was 1,604,384, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. Munich is the largest city in Germany that is no ...

, in the

Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities The Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities () is an independent public institution, located in Munich. It appoints scholars whose research has contributed considerably to the increase of knowledge within their subject. The general goal of th ...

.Holmes, N
Questions and Answers
Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften. 12/7/2007. Wölfflin described the entries in the TLL as "biographies" rather than definitions. The offices of the TLL contain copies of all surviving Latin texts from 600 CE and earlier. The stacks contain boxes that collectively contain about 10 million slips on which is "every surviving piece of writing from the classical period", sorted into usage categories by word. For example, there are about 90,000 slips for the word 'et' and 50,000 for the word 'non'. These are used as source material to create entries for each word in the thesaurus.Krebs, C. (2009
“You say ‘putator’. The first word on the first day of a Latin lexicographer,”
Times Literary Supplement, February 6, 14-5. In 2019, the TLL posted

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

copies of each entry on its website.

References

Citations

Sources

Description from the ''Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften''Celebrations after fifty years of international cooperation on the ''TLL''

External links

*Chris Smith
''Thesaurus Linguae Latinae: How the World’s Largest Latin Lexicon is brought to Life.''
In:
De Gruyter Conversations
', 05. Juli 2021. * {{Authority control Latin dictionaries Research projects Thesauri 19th-century books in Latin 20th-century books in Latin