| Description |
The “Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch” (DRW, literally: “German legal dictionary”) is the comprehensive dictionary of historical German and West Germanic legal terms. It thus covers the wide realm where language, law and history meet. Because of the DRW’s encyclopedic tendency, special attention is paid to the semantics of words. Each entry examines a word from its first historical record until the present time, which in some cases spans more than 1400 years. In addition, the dictionary cites historical usage from various regions of the West Germanic language area – from Friesland to Transylvania, from Lorraine to the Baltic States. To capture the full lexical diversity of meanings for each word, the dictionary employs techniques of synchronic and diachronic comparative law in addition to purely linguistic and lexicographic approaches. |