History of DSL: from print to DSL Online
DSL1 2000-2004
SND second supplement 2005
DSL2 2010-2014
DSL3.0 2014-2022
DSL3.1 2022-2025
DSL4.0 2025-
DSL1 (2000–2004) Top
In 2000, funding was obtained from the Arts and Humanities Research Board for the first phase of a project to digitise and make available online the content of both the Scottish National Dictionary (SND, completed in 1976) and A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST, then nearing completion) to create the online Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL).
The project was managed by a team based at the University of Dundee, in partnership initially with the Scottish National Dictionary Association (SNDA) and then Scottish Language Dictionaries Ltd, a new charitable organisation created in 2002 as a successor to both the SNDA and the DOST project. Work started on the online DSL project in early 2001, by which time the SNDA had begun the process of scanning the content of SND and converting the scans to machine-readable text with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. The same methodology was to be used for the early parts of DOST; the later parts already existed in electronic form.
The next stage was the process of codifying typographic information such as typefaces, sizes and spacing so that the appearance of the text in the print volumes could be replicated online. Although DSL1 was reasonably successful in this regard, it was largely unable to capture typographic clues to entry structure, resulting in an uncommonly flat XML structure for both dictionaries.
DSL1 was completed in 2004 with the launch of the online dictionary. For the first time, SND and DOST were freely available to anyone with a computer and internet connection and their contents – including their bibliographies – were fully searchable. The dictionaries’ introductory and explanatory material was also made available online.
SND second supplement (2005) Top
A first supplement had been included in the final volume of SND in 1976. A second supplement was published online in 2005, adding 290 new entries and additional material for nearly 4,000 existing entries. At this stage additional material from both supplements was presented separately in DSL. This meant that the content of many entries was presented as three separate, unlinked entries – one in SND and one in each of its two supplements.
DSL2 (2010–2014) Top
Lack of financial security meant Scottish Language Dictionaries Ltd was unable to tackle improvements to DSL until 2010. Work then began on strengthening the foundation of the XML to enable a more richly tagged structure. This in turn facilitated a new, improved user interface. As the University of Dundee’s team involvement with DSL had ended with DSL1, arrangements were made for the University of Glasgow to take over web hosting.
DSL2 was launched in September 2014 with many improvements, including:
- A much improved interface to make the dictionary easier to use [1]
- An autocomplete facility was added to Quick Search.
- Many more variant forms were now searchable.
- All 90,000 internal cross-references were hyperlinked to their target entry.
- Nearly all 750,000 citations were hyperlinked to their bibliographic information.
DSL3.0 (2014–2022) Top
In the years following the launch of DSL2, DSL often had to take a back seat in favour of other priorities. From 2014 to 2017 the editorial team was heavily occupied in finishing the second edition of the single-volume Concise Scots Dictionary. The entire organisation also had to move premises twice then adapt to home-working from March 2020 in response to the global Covid-19 pandemic. The shift to home-working was unexpectedly successful and led to our decision to give up our physical office and find new homes for the contents of our extensive physical archive and library – another time-consuming distraction.
Despite these interruptions, work continued on DSL, including merging the additional material from the SND and DOST supplements into their ‘parent’ entries so that they would no longer appear as separate entries, and keying many thousands of corrections and minor amendments, which mostly arose from errors produced by DSL1’s OCR procedure.
Another labour-intensive project during this period was the shift from one editing platform to another. Prior to 2017, we had developed our own editing platform which enabled us to carry out amendments and corrections to entries. While this editing platform was a major step forward, it had its limitations, not least that it was never completed as originally envisaged, which left us without a facility for exporting our edits into DSL Online.
In 2019 we took our first steps towards DPS©, a professionally-supported editing software platform, used by many major online dictionaries. The switch to DPS involved a great deal of preparatory work on our part to ensure a successful transition but quickly facilitated many significant changes, starting with the ability to launch DSL3.0.
In January 2021 we changed the name of our online platform from Dictionary of the Scots Language to Dictionaries of the Scots Language to more accurately reflect its content. This change coincided with a change in organisational name, from Scottish Language Dictionaries Ltd to Dictionaries of the Scots Language SCIO, to more accurately reflect the scope of our operations.
DSL3.0 was launched in April 2022. The main changes from DSL2 were:
- All 8,000 entries marked ‘supplementary (1976)’ or ‘supplementary (2005)’ which originated in SND’s supplements were fully integrated with SND’s original entries.
- All 2,000 entries marked ‘supplementary’ which originated in DOST’s Additions and Corrections were fully integrated with DOST’s original entries.
- Thousands of corrections and minor edits were implemented.
- An ‘About this entry’ box was added to each entry, showing when it was first published and whether it incorporates any supplementary material.
- All 3,000 references to ‘next’ or ‘preceding’ entries were replaced by hyperlinks to the relevant entries. This addressed a hangover from the dictionaries’ original print format.
- The browse order of headwords became fully alphabetical. The previous system ordered by headword ID number, which produced a sequence that was not entirely alphabetical.
- Dates were added to thousands of quotations in DOST.
- 360 sources cited but not listed in SND were added to the bibliography.
DSL3.1 (2022–2025) Top
Thanks to a number of factors our editorial team expanded significantly during this period, albeit temporarily. As of June 2025 the team consists of five permanent colleagues (equivalent to 4.2 full-timers) and three temporary colleagues (equivalent to another 1.6 full-timers). This in conjunction with a well-supported, post-Covid, home-working set-up facilitated the publication of DSL3.1 in April 2025.
The main changes from DSL3.0 were:
- Searches of DSL’s 750,000 illustrative quotations can be filtered by date.
- Addition of dating evidence summaries to each of DSL’s 80,000 entries with visual representations of these summaries, aka ‘sparklines’.
- Improved referencing of DSL’s quotations in several ways, including:
- Expansion of the most heavily abbreviated of titles to improve the clarity of references for over 20% of DOST’s 580,000 quotations.
- Replacement of all instances of ‘Id.’ (for Idem) and Ib. (for Ibidem) in SND with the name of the relevant author or work respectively.
DSL4.0 (2025–) Top
Our current work is guided by the strategic priorities determined by Dictionaries of the Scots Language SCIO’s Board of Governors in 2023, namely:
- Curation of DSL Online as our primary purpose, with smaller derivative publications and collaborating on publicly-funded projects as minor, secondary objectives.
- Modernisation of DSL Online before addition of new content.
- Prioritisation of SND over DOST.
Many of our current priorities thus address DSL’s presentation and search facilities. We are also heavily invested in developing a more robust XML structure to enable many more fundamental changes to be made in future.
[1] Compare the current homepage with the DSL1 homepage.
