LIETUVIU KALBOS ŽODYNAS [Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language] is the largest work of twentieth-century Lithuanian linguistics. The idea of the Dictionary was conceived (and its compilation begun) by the eminent Lithuanian philologist Kazimieras Buga at the turn of the twentieth century. Since then several generations of lexicographers of the Institute of the Lithuanian Language have been engaged in the preparation of its twenty volumes for six decades (published between 1941 and 2002).

The Dictionary aims to give the words and illustrate their usage by quotations culled from all kinds of writings and dialect records from the period between the year 1547, i.e. the publication of the first Lithuanian book, and 2001.

The twenty volumes of the Dictionary make up about 22,000 pages, comprising half a million headwords and over 11,000,000 words of text. This academic edition of the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language is significant not only as a major landmark of Lithuanian philology, it is also an authoritative source for comparative Indo-European studies. It presents the origin, history and spread of a word, its grammatical and accentual forms and categories, and its peculiarities with respect to word-formation, semantic structure, stylistic usage, etc. The Dictionary abounds in extra-linguistic information: the illustrative material carries much background information about the everyday life of the speakers of the language, their social relations, ethical values, ethnographical details, etc.

The Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language will be accessible online at www.lkz.lt. This Dictionary will also be issued on CD-Rom.

For further information:

Lexicography Centre

Institute of the Lithuanian Language,

P. Vileišio 5, LT-10308 Vilnius, Lithuania

Tel. +370 5 234 6472

Fax +370 5 234 7200

Email: lki@lki.lt