Information in English

This is the homepage of the Swedish Academy Dictionary, with the official title Svenska Akademiens ordbok, SAOB – a comprehensive historical dictionary published by the Swedish Academy, covering the entire modern Swedish period from 1521 onwards.

Searching

There are two ways to look up a word in the dictionary:

Quick search

The Quick search box is at the top of the Home page and every other page in the dictionary. Type or paste the word you want to find in the Search box. Click Sök or press Enter. The results of your search are displayed.

Full-text search

A full-text search of the entire dictionary text. It finds your term wherever it occurs in the dictionary. This could be in the form of an entry name, part of another word’s definition, in a quotation, etc.

To start a full-text search, click the Fritextsök search option.

About the Swedish Academy Dictionary

Everyone with an interest in languages and words can enjoy the Swedish Academy Dictionary but it is principally geared to linguists, historians, genealogists and others that require help with the reading of ancient texts.

The nearest parallels to the Swedish Academy Dictionary are the Oxford English Dictionary, Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch and Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, the first-named being the closest equivalent.

Like these works the Swedish Academy Dictionary is a lexical record of a long period of linguistic development down to the present day. All are combinations of a contemporary dictionary and a large number of dictionaries of earlier stages of the language. The Swedish Academy Dictionary looks back as far as the stage where Swedish becomes recognisably modern.

Another feature which all these historical dictionaries have in common is that morphological variations and the explanations of the meanings are illustrated by authentic quotations. The Swedish Academy Dictionary has in its collections 9 million quotations on slips. The quotations derive from about 20 000 different sources like fiction and non-fiction, periodicals, accounts, estate inventories, reports of court proceedings and so on from 1521 until today.