Akadémia Kiadó

In the last decade of the 20^th century significant changes took place in the vocabulary of Hungarian language as an effect of the technical, economic and social development: the frequency of some words earlier often used decreased while the importance of other words (together with the number of words newly arisen and words borrowed from foreign languages) increased very much. Movements in the vocabulary demanded the renewal of the Concise Dictionary of Spelling (published in 1988). First of all this meant the extension of the vocabulary of the dictionary: some 10,000 new lexical item enriched the dictionary that contains 140,000 words, while almost 1,000 outdated entries were left out. The editors, Pál Fábián, László Deme and Etelka Tóth, included words in the new dictionary that may command public interest even if their spelling sometimes seems obvious: i.e. their spelling can be confusing when they make up a phrase or a compound. The aim of the dictionary (following the method of building upon analogy and providing the standard) is to include mainly those words that have questionable spelling and at the same time are of public interest, and not to list all the words that are present in the language. The Hungarian Linguistic Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has decided upon the spelling of the words that newly enter Hungarian. In all respects the Dictionary of Hungarian Spelling is based on the "constitution" of Hungarian spelling, on the 11^th edition of the book of spelling rules (by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences) that is effective at present (The Rules of Hungarian Spelling, 1984). The large sample material enforces the principles recorded in the book of spelling rules.