Subject Guides: Open Access Resources in German Studies (OARGS): Reference

Dictionaries and Encyclopedias

DWDS Wörterbücher (The German Vocabulary from 1600 to the Present - Dictionaries) An ensemble of reference titles freely accessible online: Duden's "Großes Wörterbuch" (Great Dictionary of German), Duden's "Etymologisches Wörterbuch" (Etymological Dictionary), an OpenThesaurus, two versions of the Grimm Brothers' multivolume dictionary, and a digital history of German words.
Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz - HLS (Historical Encyclopedia of Switzerland) A scholarly, continuously updated and multimedia-enhanced lexicon of Swiss history online. Search by keywords, topics, individual or family names, locations and names of articles. German, French and Italian interfaces.
Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache - Angebote (Online Services of the Leibzig Instute for the German Language) This is a four-pronged language reference work compendium, each section of which is further divided: Corpora (of spoken and written corpora plus metadata and a repository), Dictionaries (of syntax, semantics, loanwords, neologisms, foreign words, etc.) Information Systems (atlases, grammar system, platform for lexical data, Russian German, communication of refugees, variant grammars) and Bibliographies (of speech research, lexicography, German grammar and more).
Woerterbuchnetz.de (Dictionary Network) A single search covers three dozen encyclopedias (Meyers et al.), historical language dictionaries (e.g., Old High German, Middle High German, Grimms Wörterbuch, Schweizerisches Idiotikon) and regional dictionaries (Alsatian, Palatine, Rhenish, etc.). Each title can also be individually consulted.
Zedlers Universal-Lexikon (Zedler's Universal Encyclopedia) This digitization of this major German encyclopedia from the 18th century is a joint project of the Bavaria State Library, the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel and the DFG (German Research Foundation). Browsing, searching and topically filtering possibilities. German, French and English interfaces.

Literary Finding Aids

Deutsche Dichterhandschriften des Poetischen Realismus (Index to Papers of German Authors from the Late 19th Century) An interactive index to locations of authors' papers (Nachlässe, Teilnachlässe) from the age of Poetic Realism, with links to holding institutions. The 401 authors were chosen by their appearance in major German literary bibliographies. Part of BYU Digital Collections.

Maps and Atlases

Atlanten und Karten REDE - regionalsprache.de (Atlas and Maps of Regional Language Variants in Germany) A longitudinal project with regional linguistic isoglosses integrated into one system that requires a bit of training (with guidance online). Also includes thousands of sound files, plus an extensive bibliography of related online books and articles.
Atlas Blaeu Van der Hem Part of the Austrian Photo Archive listed above, the atlas covers Austria, Germany and Switzerland in addition to other European, African and American areas.
Swisstopo From the Swiss Federal Office of Topography come online maps and data covering every square meter of Switzerland. A location search pulls up maps or high-resolution satellite pictures. A swisstopo app is available for handheld devices. German, French, Italian and English interfaces.
Topographische Karte 1:25,000 (Pre-WWII German Maps) This set of maps of Germany (in pre-1939 boundaries) was obtained by the British after the war and later given to the U.S. Army. It is now part of BYU Digital Collections. The sheets run in a numbered grid pattern, north to south and east to west, with numbers increasing by 100 each row.

Other Reference Works

Deutsche Biographie (German Biography) Knowledge about more than 730,000 persons in the German-speaking realms of Europe from the early Middle Ages to the present. Incorporates entries from the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB), the Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB) and over 200 further sources.
Bundesgesetzblatt (Federal Law Gazette) Official Gazette of the Federal Republic of Germany Online archive of the editions published from 1949 to 2022.
Family Search Decades of first microfilming and now digitization of extensive and intensive parish, civil and other genealogical records by the LDS (Mormon) Church (along with crowd-sourced family data) are applied to searching open access family trees and pedigree charts. A sign in may be required, but there are no subscription costs.
Wien Geschichte Wiki A knowledge platform for the history of the city of Vienna, based on a historical lexicon of Vienna by Felix Czeike.Hundreds of thousands of entries and thousands of illustrations, pictures, maps and other visual information.