Glossary-Vocabulary-Dictionary and the Question of their Differentiation

The German terms Glossar,Vokabular, and Worterbuch (engl. glossary,vocabulary, dictionary) are traditionally used for lexicographic works of consecutive periods of language history. This paper investigates what exactly these terms refer to and how the terminological differentiation came about by analyzing the data of current dictionaries and the self-designation of the documents. In order to characterize form and content of these three types of lexicographic work, macro- and micro-structural aspects are considered as well as the origin of the lemmata and the purpose of the documents. The changing role of German is considered the most important factor in this development, which is traced for German bilingual lexicography along general lines. While glossaries serve the explanation of and the coping with Latin, a gradual shift takes place during the propagation of vocabularies in that lexicographic work focuses more and more on the German language. Modern bilingual dictionaries, on the contrary, provide a documentation of German in coequal comparison with another language. The history of German bilingual lexicography thus shows several paradigmatic shifts.