Let's make it electronic! Lessons learned from the conversion of the Czech meteorological glossary and an initiative towards a European multilingual meteorological dictionary

Printed meteorological glossaries have been published in many European countries since the first edition of the British Meteorological Glossary in 1916. Although in recent decades most information has been transferred online, there are still only a few electronic meteorological glossaries. One of these is the Czech glossary, which was originally published in paper form in 1993; since 2018, its fully electronic version has been operating and continues to be maintained, updated and supplemented. The aim of the paper is to present experiences with this process and provide an overview of the possibilities that an electronic glossary provides compared to the printed version. Inspiration can also be drawn from meteorological glossaries of other countries. There are many advantages of electronic form of the glossary, simple search including full-term search capability as an example on the user side, possibility of classification and grouping of the terms and their allocation to the experts as well as simple and fast introducing of new terms by any (including new) authors on the maintanance side.

One of the possibilities offered by the conversion of printed glossaries into electronic documents is the linking of different national terminology databases. The creation of a multilingual meteorological glossary has already been attempted by our predecessors, but since the 1930s the development has been limited to bilingual glossaries. Linking the meteorological terminologies of different European countries into one system remains a challenge. This paper therefore also includes a discussion of the merits of creating a possible European dictionary, for which we are looking for collaborators across European countries.