About This Text

Author: Eliezer Ben-Yehuda

The Ben-Yehuda Dictionary is a historical Hebrew dictionary authored by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. Five volumes of the work were published between 1908 and Ben-Yehuda’s death in 1922. 12 additional volumes were published posthumously by his wife and son, with contributions from other scholars. Ben-Yehuda’s primary goal in compiling the dictionary was to help revive Hebrew as a spoken language. In the writing process, he consulted the medieval dictionary Machberet Menachem, Marcus Jastrow's modern dictionary, Chanoch Yehuda Kohut's Arukh HaShalem, and many other traditional and less-traditional Jewish sources. A notable feature of the dictionary is its inclusion of new words invented by Ben-Yehuda to describe modern objects that had no existing Hebrew terms.

The dictionary was digitized by dozens of volunteers at Project Ben-Yehuda, an initiative established in 1999 to digitally preserve the treasures of Hebrew literature.

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