From the earliest lists of dialect words to a unified digital dialect dictionary

The paper begins with a brief historical overview of the publication of lists of Hungarian dialect words. A detailed treatment of an ongoing project of compiling a unified digitalized dialect dictionary of Hungarian follows suit. The main issues discussed are what criteria can be used to decide what should be included in that dictionary and what would constitute an optimal system of lexicographic annotations that could serve as a basis for the search engine to be worked out. Advantages of compiling and using digitalized dialect dictionaries are listed, and organizational tasks related to the project are spelt out. The unified digital dialect dictionary, once completed, will be an important annotated database of corpus linguistics in Hungary.