The world’s largest Mongolian dictionary published

Dankook University-affiliated Mongolian Research Institute announced on the 4th that it had compiled the world’s largest Mongolian dictionary, ‘Mongolian Dictionary’. It has been 15 years since I started compiling the dictionary in 2009.

The Monghan Dictionary consists of two volumes, the top and the bottom, and contains about 85,000 words of headings on 3090 pages. After 10 years of basic work and translation, it was completed in the middle of last month after typesetting, correction and supplementary work.

In the meantime, scholars and students studying Mongolian in Korea have used Mongolian dictionaries in English, Japanese, and Chinese. In order to eliminate this inconvenience, Dankook University’s Mongolian Research Institute carried out translation, error correction, and supplementary work, focusing on the ‘Mongolian Language Detailed Dictionary’ (2008) published by the Mongolian Language and Literature Research Institute under the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. Professor Shin Kang of Mongolian Studies, who participated in the compilation, died in a sudden traffic accident, and the work was temporarily suspended.

The Mongol Korean Dictionary contains idioms, proverbs, riddles, aphorisms, and archaic words collected from all Mongolian literature written since Genghis Khan in the 12th and 13th centuries. The headwords of the text were introduced in the following order: Cyrillic (modern Mongolian) Traditional Mongolian (Uighur) Korean -Cyrillic example, Cyrillic example translated Korean sentence. An appendix contains a brief Mongolian grammar.

In celebration of the 33rd anniversary of Korea-Mongolia diplomatic ties this year, Dankook University donated the ‘Monghan-Korean Dictionary’ to the Mongolian Embassy in Korea, the Korean Language Department of the National University of Mongolia, the Korean Language Department of the University of Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, and the Korean Embassy in Jumong in order to promote friendship between the two countries.

Dankook University established the Department of Mongolia in 1993, the first among domestic universities. Song Byung-goo, director of the Institute of Mongolia Research, emphasized, “The compilation of the Great Dictionary of Mongolia has made it possible to conduct in-depth research on the Mongolian language and Mongolian culture, as well as comparative research with Korean. This is a very meaningful progress in the field of humanities.”