Eesti etümoloogiasõnaraamatust

There are two etymological dictionaries of Estonian available, yet there is an obvious need for a contemporary one. Preparatory activities for the dictionary began at the Institute of the Estonian Language in the 1970s. Actual compilation has been going on since 2003. The full rough copy was submitted in spring 2009; currently, revising and editing are in progress. The dictionary is planned as a one-volume publication for an adult reader with a non-philological background. The list of headwords consists of over 6000 stems drawn from the orthological dictionary ÕS 2006 (foreign words are excluded). The entry structure worked out for the dictionary consists of: 1) a head (headword with brief grammatical information and meaning; 2) dialectal variants; 3) words related to the same stem; 4) etymology (for genuine words equivalents from cognate languages; for early loans the source language group and equivalents from its descendant languages, as well as the equivalents of the headword in cognate languages; for more recent loans the original word and translation) and 5) commentary.