Lexin – a report from a recycling lexicographic project in the North

In the late 70s, the Swedish Board of Education initiated a project (the Lexin project) aiming at production of dictionaries between Swedish and many immigrant languages. A monolingual Swedish dictionary was compiled, serving as the common base of the bilingual dictionaries. In the 90s, the project was exported to other Nordic countries. Since the Nordic languages are closely related, much of the work carried out in Sweden could be reused in Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. Today, there are many learners’ dictionaries between Nordic languages and ‘exotic’ immigrant languages, especially with Swedish and Norwegian as source languages. In this paper, we account for some aspects of this in some respects probably unique project. At the end, we give a description of the revision and updating of the Swedish database that has been going on since 2008.