Idioticon

IDIO′TICON. (Gr[eek]) A word of frequent use in Germany, signifying a dictionary confined to a particular dialect, or containing words and phrases peculiar to one part of a country.

There exist in Germany several valuable Idiotica.

"Wische," says the Westerwald Idioticon, "expresses a quick movement connected with a whizzing or swishing sound."

This gentleman [Titus Tobler] certainly made a greater name by his work on Palestine than by that on the language of his native land; nevertheless this book marks a great advance in the scientific treatment of an Idioticon, particularly through the more accurate specification of the actual sounds and forms of the popular idiom.

The ideal [Taco H.] de Beer had in mind, was an "idioticon", which he probably visualized as a dictionary comprising all the Netherlandic dialects. Idiotica were the first results also of Flemish dialectological activities.

[T]he Flemings, anxious that the dictionary would turn out to be too 'Hollandic', started collecting their own regional words for a general Flemish idioticon.

In Western dialectology, dialect dictionaries as a phenomenon are especially widespread in the German (and, for that matter, in the Dutch) language area, where we find a deeply rooted tradition dating back to the so-called idioticons of earlier centuries.

While there was a solid tradition of idioticons by that time, dialect lexicography on the other hand only developed into a more scholarly activity by the end of the century [...].