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K. CEBERIO, A. GURRUTXAGA: State-of-the-art...
STATE-OF-THE-ART ON MONOLINGUAL 
LEXICOGRAPHY FOR THE BASQUE COUNTRY 
(BASQUE)
K L A R A  C E B E R I O
The Elhuyar Foundation
A N T T O N  G U R R U T X A G A
The Elhuyar Foundation
Ceberio, K., Gurrutxaga, A. (2019): State-of-the-art on monolingual lexicography for the 
Basque country (Basque). Slovenščina 2.0, 7 (1): 53–64. 
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/slo2.0.2019.1.53-64. 
In this article, we give an overview of the evolution of Basque lexicography to 
the present, pointing out its main achievements and shortcomings, as well as 
its challenges for the future. Basque lexicography has a relatively short history, 
but a considerable amount of resources have been produced in the last 50 years, 
since the standardisation process began. After years of lexicographic work by 
different groups and publishers, a remarkable achievement is the Dictionary 
of the Academy (Euskaltzaindiaren Hiztegia), a prescriptive updated dictio-
nary recently published and based on historical and contemporary corpora. 
Although the number of monolingual products is noticeably increasing in the 
last years, Basque dictionary making has been specially productive for bilin-
gual purposes, due probably to the sociolinguistic status of the language. On 
the other hand, specialized lexicography and terminology have been very active 
from the beginning of the standadisartion process. Since the beginning of the 
XXI. century, use of corpora has known an increasing impulse. Many Basque 
dictionaries are freely available on the Internet. 
Keywords: Basque, dictionary, corpus
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1   B E G I N N I N G S
The history of Basque lexicography was not very rich until the language’s pro-
cess of standardisation began in 1968. The first attempt towards a general, 
unified dictionary was probably the Diccionario Trilingüe del Castellano, 
Bascuence, y Latín (Trilingual dictionary of Spanish, Basque and Latin) by 
Larramendi (1745). Larramendi tried to fill gaps in the language by creating 
neologisms for the missing technical and scientific words in Basque.
In his dialectal and historical dictionary (Diccionario Vasco-Español-Francés; 
1905-1906), Azkue excluded recently borrowed terms and neologisms. Lhande 
published a dictionary (Dictionnaire basque français; Dialectes Labourdin, 
Bas-Navarrais et Souletin, 1926) which only covered the Eastern dialects. He 
used a broader criterion, in that he treated as Basque all words that were ac-
tually used.
One important point in this period is the absence of monolingual dictionaries. 
The lexicographic work focused mainly on bilingual dictionaries: compiling a 
common and dialectal lexicon using Spanish or French translations, or pro-
posing Basque equivalents for Spanish or French words. For years, the lack of 
technical, scientific terminology and an official regulatory body which could 
take on the task of proposing the necessary neologisms, forced lexicographers 
to fill in these gaps on their own or to leave them out of their dictionaries (Az-
karate, 1991).
When the process of standardisation began, the first task undertaken by Eu-
skaltzaindia, the Academy of the Basque Language, was to unify the orthogra-
phy, morphology and verbs; little attention was given to the lexicon itself, 
and it was limited to small lists of basic words. Thus, some lexicographers 
began to compile dictionaries with the aim of providing the user with re-
sources to use Basque in “new” areas and registers. Of all the dictionaries 
produced from this endeavour, the Hiztegia 80, published by Kintana et al. 
in 1980, was the most successful. It was a clear attempt to make a modern, 
standard, medium-sized bilingual dictionary, using the unified orthography 
proposed in 1968 by the Academy.
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2  S P E C I A L I Z E D D I C T I O N A R I E S
Since the mid-1970s, several organisations and working groups (mainly 
UEU, UZEI, and Elhuyar Foundation) undertook the task of expanding the use of 
Basque in specialist areas, especially science and technology, and provid-
ing the terminology and stylistic resources in Basque needed to do so. As a 
result, several technical, multilingual dictionaries were published. The task 
of defining words in Basque, a crucial step towards monolingual diction-
aries, was first undertaken in technical areas. This field is still very active, 
and some of the most remarkable results are Euskalterm, the Basque Pub-
lic Term Bank of the Basque Government, originally created by UZEI; and 
the Zientzia eta Teknologiaren Hiztegi Entziklopedikoa (Encyclopaedic Dictionary of 
Science and Technology) edited by Elhuyar. There are also some other in-
teresting technical dictionaries (Environmental Sciences, Energy, Telecom-
munications, Nursery and Automotive, among others). In 2007, the Acade-
my launched a project to collect and analyse the specialized lexicon used on 
technical texts, education books, popular science etc. The goal is to reflect 
the use of specialised lexicon and, in some cases, to give recommendations, 
but trying to minimize their amount, in order to generate the least impact 
on the real usage. Basic lexicons on Mathematics, Physics, Astronomy and 
Chemistry have been already published, and made available in PDF format 
(Oinarrizko Lexiko Teknikoak). 
3  M O N O L I N G U A L D I C T I O N A R I E S
In 1984, the Academy approved a long-term plan for the development of 
dictionaries with the aim of laying the groundwork for developing a unified 
standard dictionary of Basque (Sagarna, 2010). On the one hand, the General 
Basque Dictionary should be a compilation of vocabulary used in the corpus of 
publications until 1970, and, on the other hand, the vocabulary used in the Sta-
tistical Corpus of the 20th Century. Both projects have already been completed. The 
General Basque Dictionary (1987-2005) has 16 volumes in paper format and 
each entry contains the following information: the lemma and the variants of 
the word as they appear in texts, information about the dialects corresponding 
to these variants, according to usage in the last hundred years, the meanings 
(by reference to Spanish equivalents), and the history and examples of usage 
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Slovenščina 2.0, 2019 (1)
of the word, its compounds, expressions and etymology. Since 2009, the Gen-
eral Basque Dictionary has been available online.
Regarding monolingual general dictionaries, the Euskararako Hiztegia by 
the Adorez group was the first one to be published in 1986. Nevertheless, one of 
the most influential works was the Hautalanerako Euskal Hiztegia by Ibon 
Sarasola (1984–1995), and re-edited as Euskal Hiztegia (1996). It was com-
piled using the corpus of the General Basque Dictionary. For the first time, a 
Basque dictionary gave the date of the first occurrence of a word in the corpus. 
It also includes discussions and practical considerations about which word 
and in which form should be chosen for the standard lexicon. The three dic-
tionaries mentioned above are only available in book format.
The nineties were very productive for Basque lexicography. Firstly, the 
Basque Academy created a commission to prepare the Unified Basque Dictionary 
(2000-2016). It is mostly an orthographic or spelling dictionary, a word 
list with some additional lexicographic data. In some cases, grammatical or 
semantic notes are added. In order to establish the standard form of a word, 
the use of that word both in a historical context and in modern times had 
been taken into account. Secondly, the first encyclopaedic dictionaries were 
published: Elhuyar Hiztegi Entziklopedikoa (1993), Lur Entziklopedia (1995), 
and Harluxet Hiztegi Entziklopedikoa (1998). The last two encyclopaedias can be 
browsed online. Thirdly, we should mention the Basque Wikipedia which 
was founded in 2001 and nowadays has about 284,000 articles. Finally, 
Elhuyar published a monolingual dictionary in 1994, the Euskal Hiztegi 
Modernoa.
In recent years, one of the most notorious works has been the Academy’s 
monolingual dictionary, a work that due to its importance will be described in 
a separate section (see section 4).
4  B I L I N G U A L D I C T I O N A R I E S
In 1996, a new generation of Spanish-Basque bilingual dictionaries was re-
leased; for example, Hiztegia 3000 (Adorez) and Elhuyar Hiztegia: standard size, de-
tailed microstructure, run-on entries etc. Since then, the field of bilingual dic-
tionaries has experienced unprecedented growth.
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K. CEBERIO, A. GURRUTXAGA: State-of-the-art...
One of the most popular sites is Elhuyar Hiztegiak, which provides the option of 
searching three Basque bilingual dictionaries in a single click (from Basque 
to Spanish, French and English), together with the displaying of real exam-
ples from the Elhuyar’s Basque-Spanish web parallel corpus. The dictionaries in this 
site are updated on a daily basis, mainly thanks to the contribution of users, 
who can propose new entries or senses, and changes in the content of the 
entries (equivalents, examples, etc.). Mobile apps for Android and iOS are 
also available and a version of the Spanish Basque option is available for 
Kindle e-readers.
An interesting project to be mentioned is Nola Erran, a French-Basque online 
dictionary which is not supported by a previous printed edition, edited by Eu-
skararen erakunde publikoa.
5  S C H O O L D I C T I O N A R I E S
In the field of dictionaries for learners and students, Adorez published the first 
edition of his Eskola Hiztegia in 1995, Elhuyar published its first Ikaslearen 
Hiztegia (Dictionary of the Student) in 1997 and Vox published the Euskara 
Ikaslearen Hiztegia in 1999. All of them were published in book format. The 
last edition of Elhuyar’s Ikaslearen Hiztegia (2008) can be consulted on the Inter-
net using a code available with the purchase of the book. 
We have no precise data about dictionary use at schools. Anyway, some shal-
low surveys made in education centres, and sales data we have access to, sug-
gest that printed dictionaries are still being used at the classroom, maybe due 
to the shortage of monolingual school dictionaries available online.
6  C O R P O R A
Since 2005, Basque corpus building has been experiencing a remarkable 
growth, thanks to the Corpus of Science and Technology, the Contemporary Reference 
Prose, the Lexicon Observatory, EHUskaratuak, the Elhuyar Web Corpus and the Corpus of 
Contemporary Basque. The size of the last two corpora has reached the milestone 
of 100 million words (125 and 269, respectively).
A good example of corpus driven lexicography is the Egungo Euskararen Hiztegia 
(Dictionary of Contemporary Basque), a project designed to make available 
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online a dictionary of Basque as it is used today. The corpus behind is the 
already mentioned Ereduzko Prosa Gaur (Contemporary Reference prose), a 
25.1 million-word collection of books and newspaper articles written between 
2000 and 2007 and selected for its linguistic quality. It is an ongoing work, 
which includes at present 58,034 entries and 435,201 examples.
According to the best of our knowledge, we believe that people in general do 
not know much about the existence of corpora. Even though the use of cor-
pora has spread from the specialized linguists to other professionals who use 
Basque in their jobs (teachers, journalists, translators, editors...), or even to 
students who are specializing in the Basque language, our impression is that 
the potential of Basque corpora has not been fully exploited. Greater efforts 
should be made to extend the use of corpora, as they are a very valuable re-
source to access information about the real use of words in context.
7   D I C T I O N A R Y O F T H E A C A D E M Y: A R E F E R E N C E W O R K
The Euskaltzaindiaren Hiztegia or the Dictionary of the Academy was first pub-
lished in 2012 in book format. A second edition was published in 2016, and 
nowadays the Dictionary has more than 40,000 entries and 61,000 defi-
nitions. The previously mentioned Unified Basque Dictionary was taken 
as a starting point for the selection of list of words. The dictionary entries 
contain the following information: the lemma and the part of speech, infor-
mation about the dialects, about the fields, registers, the scientific names of 
the living organisms and examples. Examples taken from corpora are a very 
valuable resource to clarify the right use of the word. The Dictionary of the 
Academy is available on the Internet since 2016, and a pdf version can also 
be downloaded. Currently, the Academy is using the aforementioned Lexi-
con Observatory corpus to enhance and update this dictionary. This project 
aims to create a monitor corpus, that is to say a corpus designed to show the 
changes that are occurring in the use of Basque. The corpus contains texts 
published after 2000, and it is being fed continuously. In 2017, the corpus 
size is 58.5 million words. 
The Dictionary of the Academy constitutes an invaluable resource for Basque 
language users. It is a prescriptive updated dictionary based on historical and 
contemporary corpora.
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K. CEBERIO, A. GURRUTXAGA: State-of-the-art...
8  U S E O F I N T E R N E T
As we have mentioned before, many Basque dictionaries are freely available 
on the Internet. It has to be taken into account that according to the latest 
study on the use of Internet by Fundación Telefónica (2016), 85% of Basque peo-
ple between 16 and 74 usually use the Internet. So dictionary publishers are 
making a big effort to adapt their dictionaries to the new trends and make 
them available on the Internet.
9  H O W A R E T H E D I C T I O N A R I E S F U N D E D
Concerning the subject of how Basque dictionaries and other lexicographic 
works are funded, there are three types of agents mentioned in the present 
paper:
• institutions such as UEU, UZEI and Elhuyar: private organizations 
funded partly by public funds, at a very different extent;
• public institutions such as the Basque Academy and the University of 
the Basque Country: they are fully funded by public funds;
• dictionaries compiled and guided by an author such as Morris Dic-
tionary: they are funded with private funds and receive public grants.
In terms of the perception of people about the quality of the lexicographic 
products according to who has compiled them, we do think that the way the 
work has been funded is not taken too much into account when users buy or 
use a product. They appreciate more being a Basque institution or company 
behind the compilation work, rather than the funds needed to compile it.
10  C R O W D S O U R C I N G
We do not have enough data regarding crowdsourcing in lexicography. How-
ever, Elhuyar has some short experience in the area of terminology. In refer-
ence to the Zientzia eta Teknologiaren Hiztegi Entziklopedikoa (Encyclopae-
dic Dictionary of Science and Technology), apart from being on the Internet, 
a step forward has been taken shortly. It is now a collaborative encyclopaedia, 
where anyone can participate and collaborate. The contents are being super-
vised by the experts in Elhuyar. We will evaluate the results of this experience 
in the future.
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11   R E S E A R C H I N G O N D I C T I O N A R Y U S E
As far as we know, almost nothing has been done in terms of researching dic-
tionary use. Taking into account the short history of Basque lexicography, edi-
tors have had other priorities than researching dictionary use. Anyway, it is an 
issue that should be seriously considered in the near future.
12   C O N C L U S I O N S
Although Basque lexicography has a relatively short history, a considera-
ble amount of resources have been produced in the last 50 years. As book 
sales in general and dictionaries in particular have come down in the Basque 
Country during the last ten-fifteen years, financial means have consequently 
been decreasing. On the other hand, although the number of monolingual 
products is noticeably increasing in the last years, we do believe that peo-
ple in general use bilingual dictionaries (eu-es, eu-fr, eu-en) more than the 
monolingual ones. This fact can be attributable to two factors: the short his-
tory of Basque monolingual lexicography and the sociolinguistic status of 
the language.
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STANJE ENOJEZIČNE LEKSIKOGRAFIJE: 
BASKIJA
V prispevku podajamo pregled razvoja baskovske leksikografije in izpostavimo 
glavne dosežke, spodrsljaje in prihodnje izzive. Baskovska leksikografija ima 
sorazmerno kratko zgodovino, vendar pa je v zadnjega pol stoletja, odkar se 
je začel proces standardizacije, nastalo precejšnje število jezikovnih virov. Po 
letih leksikografskega dela različnih skupin in založnikov je nastal izjemni aka-
demijski preskriptivni slovar (Euskaltzaindiaren Hiztegia), ki je izšel nedavno 
in temelji na historičnih in sodobnih korpusih. Čeprav število enojezičnih del 
v zadnjih letih občutno narašča, pa je bila baskovska leksikografija še posebno 
produktivna pri izdelavi dvojezičnih slovarjev, kar gre najbrž pripisati socio-
lingvističnemu statusu jezika. Po drugi strani pa sta bili področji specializirane 
leksikografije in terminologije izjemno aktivni že od samih začetkov procesa 
standardizacije. Od začetka 21. stoletja sicer močno narašča raba korpusov, šte-
vilni slovarji baskovščine pa so prosto dostopni na spletu.
Ključne besede: baskovščina, slovar, korpus 
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