Ordbogen.com
Encyclopedia
Ordbogen.com is a commercial online dictionary owned by the company Ordbogen A/S
Aktieselskab
An aktieselskab is the Danish name for a stock-based corporation. An aktieselskab can be both publicly traded and private.-Liability:...

, based in Odense
Odense
The city of Odense is the third largest city in Denmark.Odense City has a population of 167,615 and is the main city of the island of Funen...

, Denmark
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...

, and geared toward Danish speakers and those studying the Danish language
Danish language
Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...

.

It is a commercial service which allows users to access the entire standard Danish dictionary, as well as translation dictionaries from Danish into English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

, Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...

, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

, and Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

. One has to pay to use the full dictionaries, however, the website's online search will give two searches each day for free.

According to the Alexa Internet
Alexa Internet
Alexa Internet, Inc. is a California-based subsidiary company of Amazon.com that is known for its toolbar and Web site. Once installed, the toolbar collects data on browsing behavior which is transmitted to the Web site where it is stored and analyzed and is the basis for the company's Web traffic...

 rankings, Ordbogen.com was the most popular online dictionary in Denmark in 2005, and was the most extensive, with over 110,000 entries in its Danish dictionary as of November 2006. Ordbogen.com is the 141st most popular website visited by Danish internet users as of April 2009.

History

Den Danske Netordbog ("The Danish Internet Dictionary"), a simple dictionary service for Danish speakers, was started in 2001 by the Aarhus School of Business
Aarhus School of Business
Aarhus School of Business, Aarhus University is a business school in Aarhus, Denmark. It offers both undergraduate and graduate level studies in areas such as Business, Management, Economics, Business Language, and Law....

' Center for Lexicography , and quickly became the most popular online dictionary in Denmark according to TDC A/S
TDC A/S
TDC A/S is the former telecom monopoly in Denmark. It is now privatized. Thus, it is the biggest company in all aspects of telecommunications in Denmark with landline, mobile, Internet, VHF maritime borderline-radio etc.By the end of 2004, the TDC Group had more than 13.4 mil. customers in Europe:...

.

In August 2003, Ordbogen was first launched as a translation dictionary, giving definitions of words from Danish to English and vice versa. The project was created by Cool Systems ApS (known as Ordbogen ApS today) publishing editor Jørgen Rohde's dictionary. At this time, the Danish dictionary and the translation dictionaries were completely separate entities owned and supervised by different people.

Originally funded by the Danish Ministry of Culture
Culture Minister of Denmark
Culture Minister of Denmark is the Danish political minister office responsible for culture, head of the Ministry of Culture of Denmark.The political responsibility for culture, as well as church and education, was with the Kultus Minister from 1848 to 1916 when that post was split up into the...

, Den Danske Netordbog was shut down in August 2005 due to a lack of funds. Ordbogen.com partnered with the Aarhus School of Business and Den Danske Netordbog was relaunched on November 1, 2006 on the Ordbogen website.

In the summer of 2007, Ordbogen.com introduced search capabilities from Danish to German and German to Danish, and in 2008 added Swedish, French and Spanish as well. The current Director and CEO of Ordbogen.com is Bjarni Norddahl, who co-founded the company with Michael Walther in 2001.

According to their own references, Ordbogen.com hasd been used and is recommended by a number of Danish companies and media outlets, including Amnesty International
Amnesty International
Amnesty International is an international non-governmental organisation whose stated mission is "to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights, and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated."Following a publication of Peter Benenson's...

 Danmark, GlaxoSmithKline
GlaxoSmithKline
GlaxoSmithKline plc is a global pharmaceutical, biologics, vaccines and consumer healthcare company headquartered in London, United Kingdom...

 Danmark, and national broadcaster Danmarks Radio's news department, which has used Ordbogen.com exclusively for their translation needs since 2005.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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