Estonian words for ‘field’ in historical dictionaries

Abstract The article gives an overview of Estonian landscape terms meaning ‘field’ in historical dictionaries. The main equivalents for English field in Estonian are põld, nurm and väli. Neither in standard Estonian nor in the dialects, these three words are full synonyms. In the historical dictionaries, the Estonian words occur first in the 17th century as translations of German Acker, Feld and Ackerfeld. Later, for example in the Estonian-German dictionary, published in 1869, their meanings are more precisely defined. The semantic relations of the words in dialect speech and their interpretation in the historical dictionaries will be analysed. The three words are used in all Finnic languages. Comparing the words with dialect and cognate language data, their semantic differences and distribution in dialects will be introduced.