Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache
Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache (Dictionary of the Egyptian Language) is a major German-language dictionary of Ancient Egyptian. It was created by Adolf Erman and Hermann Grapow and published between 1926 and 1961. The work covers about 3,000 years of Egyptian language, including Old, Middle, and Late Egyptian, as well as hieroglyphic inscriptions from the Classical Greco-Roman period. It contains roughly 16,000 headwords across five main volumes, plus two secondary volumes and five volumes of primary-source references. It is the largest and most complete printed dictionary of Ancient Egyptian to date.
The project began in 1897 at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin and is often called the Berlin Dictionary. Its progress was interrupted by World War I and World War II, with the first volumes appearing in 1926 and the final volume in 1961. Today, the Wörterbuch forms the basis for the Altägyptisches Wörterbuch (Dictionary of Ancient Egyptian), an updated dictionary and online digitization project run by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 1993.
Key historical notes include an intermediate release called the Egyptian Concise Dictionary in 1921; the five main volumes were funded by John D. Rockefeller Jr.; and the dictionary was signed off by the Danish Egyptologist Wolja Erichsen.
This page was last edited on 29 January 2026, at 08:51 (CET).