- Feb 2024
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www.grimmwelt.de www.grimmwelt.de
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A section of a wall of slips in the Grimmwelt Museum showinghow the Brothers Grimm pioneered the methods used by theOED twenty years later.
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showing the hundreds of volunteers who corresponded with the brothers; theeditors’ lists of words and statistical counts of entries; the tracing ofetymology using the new scientific philological methods of the day; thegathering of citations from historical, published sources. I had worked in theOED archives for years and the contents of the Grimmwelt Museum lookedidentical.
They looked exactly like the slips sent into the OED by the Dictionary People. There was a world map
Lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie, a previous editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, said she "had worked in the OED archives for years and the contents of the Grimmwelt Museum looked identical" to them. She indicated that the similarity of the dictionary projects extended to the hundreds of volunteers, lists of words, counts of entries, etymology work, citations from published sources, and general philological methods used by the editors of the era.
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There was a dramatic wall of vastnumbers of slips, or ‘zettel’, hanging from long nails.
The Grimmwelt Museum in Kassel, Germany is the home of some of the work of Grimm Brothers work on the Deutsches Wörterbuch which features a large wall of zettel or slips hanging from long nails.
The slips hanging on nails sounds similar to Thomas Harrison's 1740's wooden cabinet of hanging slips used for excerpts and isn't far off from the organizational structure used by the subsequent Oxford English Dictionary's pigeonhole system of organization for their slip collection.
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Jacob Grimm and his brother Wilhelm were also lexicographerswho created and edited the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the German equivalent ofthe OED. Or rather I should say, the OED is the English equivalent of theDeutsches Wörterbuch, because the German dictionary was started first (evenif it ended up being finished later because the Brothers Grimm died beforethe letter G, and it took another hundred years to complete).
The Deutsches Wörterbuch (DWB) was begun in 1838 by brothers Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm who worked on it through the letter F prior to their deaths. The dictionary project was ended in 1961 after 123 years of work which resulted in 16 volumes. A further 17th source volume was released in 1971.
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- Deutsches Wörterbuch (DWB)
- Grimm Brothers
- Wilhelm Grimm
- card index for dictionaries
- zettelkasten examples
- Deutsches Wörterbuch zettelkasten
- Jacob Grimm
- XIX
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- Oxford English Dictionary
- Thomas Harrison's Ark of Studies
- lexicographers
- Oxford English Dictionary zettelkasten
- Grimmwelt Museum
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