1 Making Historical Dictionaries by Computer

The paper wishes to examine the difficulties encountered when compiling a historical dictionary from scratch. The well-known unabridged dictionaries were mainly made by traditional methods, but today it seems obvious that computer corpora should be used for new projects, as well as for updating existing dictionaries. Through the example of the ongoing project of the “Historical Dictionary of Hungarian”1 I would like to draw attention to the specialities of historical dictionaries and the limitations of using computerised corpora for compiling them