FWB-online – a brief insight into an online dictionary revealing information on historical linguistics, cultural history and the impact of time and geography on the German language in the early modern era

Abstract This essay will show, by the example of FWB-online (the online version of Frühneuhochdeutsches Wörterbuch), some possibilities to enhance the added value of traditional printed historical dictionaries published online by providing their data with deep structured semantic mark-up. This semantic mark-up can basically be used as a foundation for elaborated search and in a further advanced step also for visualizing specific aspects of the dictionary data, thus allowing for new perspectives on it. It will be shown, how these search methods and especially this kind of visualization of dictionary data can enable advanced approaches on both old and new scientific questions.