Developments in the Structure of Dictionaries of Foreign Words in Slovak

Slovak dictionaries developed significantly over the course of the past century. There is a long tradition of dictionaries of foreign words, inspired in part by German and Slavic examples. Since 1922, when the first dictionary of foreign words was published, more than forty dictionaries of this type have appeared. Such a quantity is impressive as it implies that on average, a new dictionary or revised edition was published nearly every two years. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the development in this genre of dictionaries. In order to do so, I compared five dictionaries of foreign words in Slovak SCSVS (1939), SCS (1953), SCS (1966), VSCS (1997) and SCSA (2005) with a central focus on their properties such as macrostructure, microstructure, intended users, and medium. A key selection criterion was that each of the five dictionaries represents a different historical period, which can be assumed to influence these properties. The results of the analysis are compared with the situation in German and English in the respective periods. This comparison determines the position of the Slovak tradition of dictionaries of foreign words in the broader European context.