The ‘Warsaw Dictionary’, digitized by one researcher, was largely published in the interwar years and contains vocabulary from Poland’s time as a newly independent nation. Much of the largest ever compiled dictionary of the Polish language is now available to be viewed online after a researcher painstakingly digitized tens of thousands of entries from a century-old set of books. The so-called “Warsaw Dictionary”, which contains more than 260,000 entries across almost 7,700 pages, was published in eight volumes between 1900 and 1927 and remains the largest Polish dictionary. Dr. Mirosław Koziarski first undertook the task to digitize the entries as part of his doctoral thesis at Adam Mickiewicz University in the western city of Poznań, when he managed to convert around 80 pages from paper to screen. He decided to continue the project in his spare time following his doctorate, however, and has now managed to digitize 2,000 pages – about 86,000 entries – in less than three months. “This nearly century-old work records a vast number of forms, not only from the general language, but also dialectal forms, loanwords… The dictionary contains numerous errors and inconsistencies, but it is an invaluable source of knowledge,” Koziarski told Polish public press agency PAP. “The platform I’ve provided allows for convenient searching of previously developed entries, statistical analysis and comparison of entries with modern dictionaries. I plan to gradually develop subsequent volumes and expand this tool for researchers and all language enthusiasts,” he added. Language of a re-emerging state Much of the dictionary’s content comes from a time when a budding Polish state was trying to solidify its national and cultural identity after re-emerging as an independent country at the end of World War I. The country had fallen under the rule of its imperialist neighboring powers, Russia, Prussia and Austria-Hungary, over a century earlier. Koziarski said: “The interwar period was a time of consolidation of the lands of the three partitions. Many dictionaries from that period… were created to replace Polonized German, Russian and French words with native equivalents. “A great deal of vocabulary was invented month by month for the purposes of state-building,” the researcher added, with many of the words in the database being archaic and difficult to understand by modern Polish speakers. Koziarski told PAP that digitizing the Warsaw Dictionary was difficult due to inconsistencies in how its entries were structured, with software sometimes struggling to identify which parts of an entry contained which elements, such as a word’s definition, etymology and example sentences. Even with his workarounds, Koziarski said his online database is not perfect, which is why each entry contains a scanned copy of the corresponding dictionary page, allowing users to view the original content and report errors. ‘Language exists in people’s heads’ Dr. Koziarski told PAP that he undertook the project at his own expense, saying he did not want to deal with the bureaucracy involved in applying for research grants. “I see how much energy my colleagues at universities have to devote to organizational and grant matters. I prefer to spend that time on things I personally find interesting and worthwhile,” he said. The website with the dictionary database allows users to donate money to the project if they want to. Koziarski told PAP: “Language exists in people’s heads, but the entire language is not in any one head. No one knows the entire language unless they were the last person to speak it.”
