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The Duden is a dictionary of the German language, and has long been the prescriptive source of German regarding grammar and spelling. It was first published by Konrad Duden in 1880, with regular updates every four or five years. The current edition published in 2020 is the 28th. In the 20th century, the Duden Verlag (Duden publishing house) (Mannheim, then Berlin) developed a series with further specialised dictionaries as well as a grammar, which also appeared under the title Duden.1https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duden [16.12.2020] The Duden dictionary is also available online. 2Duden Wörterbuch Online: https://www.duden.de/woerterbuch [16.12.2020]
History
In 1872 Konrad Duden published his treatise Die deutsche Rechtschreibung (The German Orthography), which became the basis for the following orthographic dictionaries. Eight years later, the first edition of his main work, the Vollständige Orthographische Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Complete Orthographical Dictionary of the German Language3Stang (2013), was published by the Bibliographisches Institut (Bibliographical Institute) in Leipzig. This first Duden collected 27,000 keywords on 187 pages, and was declared the official source for correct spelling in the administration of Prussia. In 1902 the Duden was confirmed as the official standard for German spelling and continued to be the de facto standard for the next decade.
After World War II and as consequence of the German division, the Duden tradition continued separately in East Germany (1951, Leipzig) and West Germany (1954, Mannheim). The main differences between the two versions of Duden appear in the number of entries (Stichwörter), with a diminishing number of entries in the East German Duden as compared to an increasing number in the West German edition, and in the type of lexical entries. Socialist-influenced terms and loan words from Russian were found in the G.D.R. Duden, and new West German everyday terms and loan words from English were added to the F.R.G. Duden. As late as the 1960s, the Leipzig Duden editorial office, which sees itself in a historical tradition, tried to publish a dictionary that was as apolitical as possible in order to prevent a division of spelling in Germany.4https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duden [16.12.2020] In the 1950s, some publishing houses in West Germany questioned the Duden monopoly, but in 1955 the ministers of culture of the states of Germany confirmed the spellings given by the Duden would continue to be the official standard.5https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duden [16.12.2020] Printing continued in both Mannheim and Leipzig until the German reunification in 1990.
Duden today
The 20th edition of the Duden (August 1991) is known as Einheitsduden because it reunited the two German Duden. The publishing group Bibliographisches Institut & F. A. Brockhaus AG had taken over the Bibliographisches Institut Leipzig. This Duden was the last edition before the spelling reform of 1996. On May 2, 2011 Duden online was launched as a free service. In 2019, the online offer contains over 236,000 entries6Duden Wörterbuch Online: https://www.duden.de/woerterbuch [16.12.2020]