Digital Old Church Slavonic Dictionary

The Digital Old Church Slavonic Dictionary was created within the project GORAZD: An Old Church Slavonic Digital Hub (the project was implemented in the framework of the NAKI II programme of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, DG16P02H024, for the years 2016-2020). It is a specialized public database based on a four-volume Old Church Slavonic Dictionary (OCSD, vol. I: Prague 1966, vol. II: Prague 1973, vol. III: Prague 1982, vol. IV: Prague 1997), so far the most extensive Old Church Slavonic dictionary in the world. This 3202-page dictionary captures the complete vocabulary of Old Church Slavonic of the Cyrillo-Methodian period, including younger Church Slavonic copies of texts of presumed Cyrillo-Methodian origin. Church Slavonic texts of Czech origin were also included in the dictionary. Almost 100 manuscripts were excerpted. The dictionary contains approximately 18,000 entries.

In the years 2008-2016, Supplements to Volume I of the Old Church Slavonic Dictionary were published (completely appeared as Volume V of the OCSD, Prague 2016). Its goal was to process additions and corrections to the entries of the Volume I of the OCSD. In particular, there was a methodological unification of the microstructure, which was finalized only during the publication of the first fascicles of the dictionary. Besides that, also new entries were composed. This was linked to the fact that Volume I of the OCSD did not contain the vocabulary of the new finds of Old Church Slavonic manuscripts and the texts were not excerpted completely.

In 2016, the digitization of the Old Church Slavonic Dictionary was started as part of the GORAZD Project: An Old Church Slavonic Digital Hub. The dictionary was converted to digital form using the OCR method. The digital material was submitted to significant correction and revision, which consisted in the direct implementation of the Supplements to Volume I of the Old Church Slavonic Dictionary further unification of the microstructure and supplementing of English equivalents (in addition to the existing Czech, German and Russian ones). The specialized and factual explanations included in the entries, originally written in Latin, were translated into English in order to make them accessible to a wider range of users.

The Digital Old Church Slavonic Dictionary is available using the advanced Gulliver presentation environment (developed by the company AiP Beroun). This environment includes also the Dictionary of the Oldest Old Church Slavonic Manuscripts and the Greek-Old Church Slavonic Index (I. díl). (Volume I). This enables advanced search and filtering features, as well as creating and managing user’s collections across integrated dictionaries. The OCSD is interlinked with the scanned Old Church Slavonic Card Index, which comprises the excerption of the texts, based on which the OCSD was created. Thus, the OCDS digital entries enable easy access to all excerpted records of the given lexeme. From the cited Greek equivalents, it is also possible to access digitized entries in the hitherto published parts of the Greek-Old Slavonic Index.

Access to the database: http://gorazd.org/gulliver/?envLang=en

© 2020, Institute of Slavonic Studies of the Czech Academy of Sciences