The Card Catalogue of the Lexical Archive (1911-1991)

The card catalogue of the modern Czech lexical archive contains the excerpts that formed the basis of all major monolingual Czech dictionaries. The core material layer of the archive, the “primary” material, served as a starting point for the development of the Příruční slovník jazyka českého (Desk Dictionary of the Czech Language).

Excerpts were collected following elaborate excerpting rules (from 1911 and 1917). Leaf extracts were created mainly on artistic literature as well as on professional and scholarly literature. Newspapers, magazines and translated literature works were excerpted selectively. The year 1770 was set as the lower limit for excerpting, which enabled, among other things, documentation of Czech from the national revival period.

Over the years, the collections of lexical material have been gradually expanded as department staff capacity has allowed.