The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, initiated in 1921 by James Henry Breasted, is compiling a comprehensive dictionary of the various dialects of Akkadian, the earliest known Semitic language that was recorded on cuneiform texts that date from c. 2400 B.C. to A.D. 100 which were recovered from archaeological excavations of ancient Near Eastern sites. The Assyrian Dictionary is in every sense a joint undertaking of resident and non-resident scholars from around the world who have contributed their time and labor over a period of seventy years to the collection of the source materials and to the publication of the Dictionary.

The handlist of Ancient Egyptian words known to Egyptologists as the "Beinlich Wordlist" was announced by Horst Beinlich and Friedhelm Hoffmann in Göttinger Miszellen 140 (1994), 101-3. The raw data of the Wordlist is simply the Egyptian word in transliteration, a German translation, and brief references to the Wörterbuch or more recent publications. It is everyone's wish that the authors' hope of translations of the wordlist into other languages might come about.

A new dictionary of the Aramaic language, to be called The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon, has been in preparation by an international team of scholars since 1986, currently with headquarters at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. This major scholarly reference work will cover all dialects and periods of ancient Aramaic, one of the principal languages of antiquity, with a literature of central importance for history and civilization, and especially for the Jewish and Christian religions.

The Demotic Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CDD) is a lexicographic tool for reading texts written in a late stage of the ancient Egyptian language and in a highly cursive script known as Demotic. In use from ca. 650 B.C. until the middle of the fifth century A.D., Demotic served as the medium for a wide variety of text types. These include “documentary” texts, such as business and legal documents, private letters and administrative inscriptions, and “literary” texts, including not only works of literature per se, for example, narrative texts and pieces of wisdom literature, but also religious and magical texts and scientific texts dealing with topics such as astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Demotic texts thus not only provide important witnesses for the development of ancient Egyptian linguistic and paleographical traditions but also constitute an indispensable source for reconstructing the social, political, and cultural life of ancient Egypt during a fascinating period of its history.

The CDD is intended to supplement and update W. Erichsen’s Demotisches Glossar, which was published in 1954 and has been the only large-scale dictionary of Demotic available to the scholarly world.

The Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics Online offers a systematic and comprehensive treatment of all aspects of the history and study of the Hebrew language from its earliest attested form to the present day.
The Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics Online features advanced search options, as well as extensive cross-references and full-text search functionality using the Hebrew character set.

The Etymological Dictionary of Akkadian is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft as a long-term project. The project leaders are Leonid Kogan (Moscow), Manfred Krebernik (Jena) and Michael P. Streck (Leipzig). The project started on July 1st, 2013.

One module of the project is to create a Supplement to the Akkadian dictionaries mentioned above. This is the task of the Leipzig team (Michael P. Streck, Nadezda Rudik). The supplement is meant to provide new references for Akkadian words in the many texts published after the end of the Akkadisches Handwörterbuch and The Assyrian Dictionary of the University of Chicago as well as new secondary literature and corrections. The supplement is published online below.

The Chicago Hittite Dictionary Project (CHD) was officially started in 1975 with the awarding of an NEH grant to Harry A. Hoffner and Hans G. Güterbock, the editors. It was conceived in answer to a recognized need for a Hittite-English lexical tool, a concordance for lexicographical research for all parts of the corpus of Hittite texts.

This lexicon contains 1,255 Sumerian logogram words and 2,511 Sumerian compound words. A logogram is a reading of a cuneiform sign which represents a word in the spoken language. Sumerian scribes invented the practice of writing in cuneiform on clay tablets sometime around 3400 B.C. in the Uruk/Warka region in the south of ancient Iraq. [The etymology of 'Iraq' may come from this region, biblical Erech. Medieval Arabic sources used the name 'Iraq' as a geographical term for the area in the south and center of the modern republic.] The Sumerian language spoken by the inventors of writing is known to us through a large body of texts and through bilingual cuneiform dictionaries of Sumerian and Akkadian, the language of their Semitic successors, to which Sumerian is not related. These bilingual dictionaries date from the Old Babylonian period (1800-1600 B.C.), by which time Sumerian had ceased to be spoken, except by the scribes. The earliest and most important words in Sumerian had their own cuneiform signs, whose origins were pictographic, making an initial repertoire of about a thousand signs or logograms. Beyond these words, two-thirds of this lexicon now consists of words that are transparent compounds of separate logogram words. I have greatly expanded the section containing compounds in this version, but I know that many more compound words could be added.

Pleiades is a community-built gazetteer and graph of ancient places. It publishes authoritative information about ancient places and spaces, providing unique services for finding, displaying, and reusing that information under open license.