The Duden () is a

dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged Alphabetical order, alphabetically (or by Semitic root, consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical-and-stroke sorting, radical an ...

of the Standard High German language, first published by Konrad Duden in 1880, and later by Bibliographisches Institut GmbH, which was merged into

Cornelsen Verlag Cornelsen Verlag () is a German textbook publisher that offers educational media in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Initially focused on the English language, the publishing house, founded in Berlin in 1946, specialized in the development of te ...

in 2022. The Duden is updated regularly with new editions appearing every four or five years. , it is in its 29th edition. It is printed as twelve volumes, with each volume covering different aspects of the German language such as

loanword A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term t ...

etymology Etymology ( ) is the study of the origin and evolution of words—including their constituent units of sound and meaning—across time. In the 21st century a subfield within linguistics, etymology has become a more rigorously scientific study. ...

pronunciation Pronunciation is the way in which a word or a language is spoken. To This may refer to generally agreed-upon sequences of sounds used in speaking a given word or all language in a specific dialect—"correct" or "standard" pronunciation—or si ...

synonyms A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. For example, in the English language, the words ''begin'', ''start'', ''commence'', and ''initiate'' are a ...

, etc. The first of these volumes, ' ( English: The German orthography), has long been the prescriptive source for Standard High German spelling. The Duden has become the most widely used language resource of the Standard High

German language German (, ) is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, mainly spoken in Western Europe, Western and Central Europe. It is the majority and Official language, official (or co-official) language in Germany, Austria, Switze ...

, stating the rules regarding grammar, spelling and use of Standard High German language. In Austria, the

Österreichisches Wörterbuch The (; English: "Austrian Dictionary"), abbreviated ''ÖWB'', is the official spelling dictionary of Standard German in Austria, i.e. of Austrian Standard German. It has been edited since 1948 by a group of linguists under the authority of the ...

takes that role.

History

Konrad Duden's Schleizer Duden (1872) and Urduden (1880)

In 1872, Konrad Duden, then headmaster of a ' (secondary school), had his treatise ''Die deutsche Orthoschrift'' ("German orthography") published by B.G. Teubner in Leipzig. That book included both a dictionary and spelling rules for school use.Stefan Alles, "Duden, Konrad" in ''Hessische Biografie,'' 25 February 2013, Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS, State Historical Information System, Hesse). Often known as the ''Schleizer Duden'' – the author was then the headmaster of a ' (secondary school) in

Schleiz Schleiz () is a town in the Districts of Germany, district of Saale-Orla-Kreis in Thuringia, Germany. The former municipality Crispendorf was merged into Schleiz in January 2019, and Burgk in December 2019. Location Schleiz is in the Thuring ...

, now in

Thuringia Thuringia (; officially the Free State of Thuringia, ) is one of Germany, Germany's 16 States of Germany, states. With 2.1 million people, it is 12th-largest by population, and with 16,171 square kilometers, it is 11th-largest in area. Er ...

— the work significantly influenced a debate about German spelling and became the template for subsequent dictionaries. Eight years later, having moved to a grammar school in Hersfeld as headmaster, Konrad Duden's main work was published, considerably expanded from the ''Schleizer Duden''. The first edition of this new work, ' (Complete Orthographical Dictionary of the German Language), later sometimes referred to by the publisher as ''Urduden'', was published in Leipzig and was the first major complete dictionary of German.
Der Urduden
'' website of Verlags Bibliographisches Institut, 2013, accessed 7 December 2014. This first "Duden" collected 28,000 keywords on 187 pages and subsequently prevailed throughout the German Empire as a standard reference work. From 1892, its spellings also became binding in Switzerland.

From 1901 to 1996

In 1902, the Bundesrat confirmed the Duden as the official standard for German spelling;

Austria-Hungary Austria-Hungary, also referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Dual Monarchy or the Habsburg Monarchy, was a multi-national constitutional monarchy in Central Europe#Before World War I, Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. A military ...

and

Switzerland Switzerland, officially the Swiss Confederation, is a landlocked country located in west-central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany to the north, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east. Switzerland ...

soon followed suit. In the ensuing decades, the Duden continued to be the de facto standard for German

orthography An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis. Most national ...

. After

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

this tradition continued separately in

East East is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from west and is the direction from which the Sun rises on the Earth. Etymology As in other languages, the word is formed from the fact that ea ...

and

West Germany West Germany was the common English name for the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from its formation on 23 May 1949 until German reunification, its reunification with East Germany on 3 October 1990. It is sometimes known as the Bonn Republi ...

, in

Leipzig Leipzig (, ; ; Upper Saxon: ; ) is the most populous city in the States of Germany, German state of Saxony. The city has a population of 628,718 inhabitants as of 2023. It is the List of cities in Germany by population, eighth-largest city in Ge ...

and

Mannheim Mannheim (; Palatine German language, Palatine German: or ), officially the University City of Mannheim (), is the List of cities in Baden-Württemberg by population, second-largest city in Baden-Württemberg after Stuttgart, the States of Ger ...

, respectively. In West Germany, some publishing houses began to attack the Duden "

monopoly A monopoly (from Greek language, Greek and ) is a market in which one person or company is the only supplier of a particular good or service. A monopoly is characterized by a lack of economic Competition (economics), competition to produce ...

" in the 1950s, publishing dictionaries which contained alternative spellings. In reaction, in November 1955, the ministers of culture of the

states of Germany The Federal Republic of Germany is a federation and consists of sixteen partly sovereign ''states''. Of the sixteen states, thirteen are so-called area-states ('Flächenländer'); in these, below the level of the state government, there is a ...

confirmed the spellings given by the Duden would continue to be the official standard.

East German Duden (Leipzig)

In 1954, the first published Duden appeared in

, the western counterpart to the traditional Duden printing city of

. The first

East German East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was a country in Central Europe from its formation on 7 October 1949 until its reunification with West Germany (FRG) on 3 October 1990. Until 1989, it was generally vie ...

Duden appeared in Leipzig in 1951, but was largely ignored as illegitimate by

. The printing continued in both Mannheim and Leipzig until the fall of the

Berlin Wall The Berlin Wall (, ) was a guarded concrete Separation barrier, barrier that encircled West Berlin from 1961 to 1989, separating it from East Berlin and the East Germany, German Democratic Republic (GDR; East Germany). Construction of the B ...

in 1989. The differences between the two versions of Duden printed during this period appear in the number of entries. When the printing of the two Dudens began, in 1954 and 1951, the number of entries included was roughly the same. As the split between the printers versions continued, the East German Duden slowly began diminishing the number of entries in its volume while the West German Duden printed in Mannheim increased the number of entries. The major differences between the two Dudens are seen in the lexical entries. The East German Duden included various loan words from Russian, particularly in the area of politics, such as and . Also new to the East German Duden were words stemming from Soviet agricultural and industrial organization and practices. Of note, there are a few

semantic Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

changes recorded in the East German Duden that evolved from contact with

Russian Russian(s) may refer to: *Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *A citizen of Russia *Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages *''The Russians'', a b ...

. The East German Duden records the

nominalization In linguistics, nominalization or nominalisation, also known as nouning, is the use of a word that is not a noun (e.g., a verb, an adjective or an adverb) as a noun, or as the head (linguistics), head of a noun phrase. This change in functional c ...

of German words by adding the

suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can ca ...

, borrowed from the Russian language suffix. Furthermore, additional words were recorded as a result of the increasing number of

adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a determiner, a clause, a preposition, or a sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, or level of certainty by ...

s and

adjective An adjective (abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main part of speech, parts of ...

s negated with the prefix , such as ("unserious") and ("un-concrete", " irreal"). The few lexical and semantic items uniquely recorded in the East German Duden migrated from ' because the printing press in Leipzig did not publish the multiple volume Duden which has become the current standard.

Reform Duden

On the cover of the Duden, 25th Edition, Volume 1, these words are printed in red letters: '. This translates as: "The comprehensive standard reference ''based on the current official rules''." The "current official rules" are the result of the

German orthography reform of 1996 The German orthography reform of 1996 (') was a change to German spelling and punctuation that was intended to simplify German orthography and thus to make it easier to learn, without substantially changing the rules familiar to users of the lan ...

Volumes

# ' – ''The German Orthography'' (Spelling Dictionary) # ' – ''The Dictionary of Style'' # ' – ''The Pictorial Dictionary'' # ' – ''The Grammar'' # ' – ''The Dictionary of Foreign Words'' # ' – ''The Pronouncing Dictionary'' # ' – ''The

Etymological Etymology ( ) is the study of the origin and evolution of words—including their constituent units of sound and meaning—across time. In the 21st century a subfield within linguistics, etymology has become a more rigorously scientific study. ...

Dictionary'' # ' – ''The Synonym-Dictionary'' (

Thesaurus A thesaurus (: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar me ...

) # ' – ''Correct and Good German'' (Guide to usage) # ' – ''The Meaning-Dictionary'' (Definitions) # ' – ''Figures of Speech'' # ' – ''Quotations and Sayings''

References

Literature

* Betz, Werner. ' 'Modified language of the world: semantics, politics and manipulation'' Edition Interfrom AG:

Zürich Zurich (; ) is the list of cities in Switzerland, largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is in north-central Switzerland, at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich. , the municipality had 448,664 inhabitants. The ...

, 1977. * Hellmann, Manfred W. (ed.) ' 'On public usage in the Federal Republic of Germany and in the GDR''

Düsseldorf Düsseldorf is the capital city of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state of Germany. It is the second-largest city in the state after Cologne and the List of cities in Germany with more than 100,000 inhabitants, seventh-largest city ...

: Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann, 1973. * Reich, Hans H. ' 'Language and politics: studies on vocabulary and terminology of the official use of language in the GDR''

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 ...

: Max Hueber Verlag, 1968. * Schlosser, Horst Dieter (ed). ' 'Communications requirements and everyday language in the former GDR''

Hamburg Hamburg (, ; ), officially the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg,. is the List of cities in Germany by population, second-largest city in Germany after Berlin and List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, 7th-lar ...

: Helmut Buske Verlag, 1991. * Siegl, Elke Annalene. ' 'Duden East, Duden West: On language in Germany since 1945: a comparison of Leipzig and Mannheim editions of Duden since 1947''

: Schwann, 1989.

External links

* {{Authority control 1880 non-fiction books German dictionaries German language Spelling dictionaries