The New York Times recently profiled what appears to be the world’s longest running research project: the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (T.L.L.). The project, started 125 years ago, is an exhaustive documentation of every Latin word, including every single way anyone ever used the word, from the earliest Latin inscriptions in the sixth century B.C. to around A.D. 600.
While the T.L.L. project has been referred to as an Latin dictionary, the project is much more extensive in scope than a typical dictionary. The project’s founder, Eduard Wölfflin, described it as “biographies” of words, as opposed to definitions of words.
The project has produced 18 volumes so far, which has been the result of the collective work of nearly 400 scholars. As the Times noted, “The first entry, for the letter A, was published in 1900. The T.L.L. is expected to reach its final word — “zythum,” an Egyptian beer — by 2050.”