ordboksarbeid

Ordboksarbeid refers to the systematic process of creating, updating, and maintaining dictionaries. It covers selecting lemmas, compiling and organizing senses, providing definitions, part-of-speech labels, pronunciation guides, inflection patterns, etymologies, and usage notes. Lexicographers work with linguistic data from written and spoken sources, corpora, fieldwork, and expert consultation to document how words are used and how their meanings and forms change over time.

The process typically involves editorial teams at universities, publishers, and language institutions. In modern practice, ordbokarbeid is increasingly corpus-based and collaborative, with revisions informed by large linguistic databases, automated tooling, and human review. Entries are continuously revised in online dictionaries, with new senses added and orthographic standards updated as language evolves.

Outputs include monolingual dictionaries for a language variety (such as Bokmål and Nynorsk in Norwegian contexts), bilingual dictionaries, and specialized lexica for fields like science and technology. These resources support education, publishing, language planning, and natural language processing. Data from ordbokarbeid also informs spelling reforms, lexicographic conventions, and standardized terminology.

Historically, ordbokarbeid has roots in early lexicography practices, evolving from handwritten wordlists to comprehensive printed dictionaries and, more recently, digital editions. The field faces ongoing challenges such as documenting regional variation and dialects, balancing descriptive accuracy with user needs, managing neologisms, and addressing copyright and licensing for data sources.

See also lexicography, dictionary, corpus linguistics, Norwegian language policy.