The “Chicago Hittite Dictionary Project” is a research and publication project of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. The Hittite language is the earliest preserved member of the Indo-European family of languages. It was written on clay tablets in central Asia Minor (modern Turkey) over a 500-year timespan, from about 1650 to 1180 b.c. Over the past century, archaeologists have unearthed tens of thousands of Hittite tablets.

The Chicago Hittite Dictionary Project began in 1975 in answer to a recognized need for a Hittite-English lexical tool—a concordance for lexicographical research for all parts of the corpus of Hittite texts. Several volumes of the multivolume dictionary have now been published and many more are in preparation. The “Electronic Chicago Hittite Dictionary” (eCHD) is a vehicle for disseminating the contents of the dictionary in an electronic form suitable for advanced philological research.

Click here to launch the eCHD.

Technical Requirements

The eCHD makes use of the “Online Cultural Heritage Research Environment” (OCHRE), an innovative Internet database system for cultural heritage information. OCHRE requires the Java Runtime Environment (version 5.0 or later), which comes preinstalled on most computers. If you do not have Java, or are not sure you have the latest version, click here to install Java, free of charge, and then click the link above to launch the eCHD. OCHRE requires a high-speed Internet connection, at least 512 MB of main memory, and a screen resolution of at least 1024 × 768 pixels.  Apple Macintosh users must have OS X 10.4 or higher.

[Last revised on  March 31, 2009.]

Online Cultural Heritage Research Environment

Developed at the University of Chicago to integrate cultural heritage data—within one research project or across many different projects.

Chicago Hittite Dictionary