Ben-Yehuda Dictionary

[6] He expresses that perception in the article "A Burning Question" (Hebrew: שאלה לוהטה) which was published in "Ha-Shaḥar" newspaper.

Three years later he wrote the following in the "Havazelet" newspaper: "There was not yet time for Israel since the day of its departure from its land that unity is as needed as today.

He researched and asked language experts if such a revival process had occurred in the past, but received negative responses.

[10] He decided to check his theory by starting to talk to himself in Hebrew but quickly found out his vocabulary was limited.

He started by writing the name of the vessels from "Masechet Keilim" from the Mishna,[11] and later he wrote some less common words he encountered.

There he first heard Jews reading the Torah in Sephardic pronunciation and spoke with the Jewish community only in Hebrew which improved his language skills.

After the value was published Ben-Yehuda realized lists like that would not be enough to accomplish the vision that the entire nation would speak Hebrew.

When his father-in-law, Shlomo Jonas, published a cautious nationalist article in the newspaper "Hatzevi", in which he called to celebrate Hanukkah 1893 as a holiday of Jewish heroism against the backdrop of the awakening of Zionism, he signed with the words: "Let us gather strength and go forward", The Charedim, who opposed Ben-Yehuda's vision mistranslated these words as an intention to gather an army to rebel the Ottomans, reported Ben-Yehuda to the Ottmans as the editor of the paper.

[13] However, he was not allowed to re-publish his newspaper "Hatzevi" which gave him time to devote himself entirely to writing the dictionary.

[14] To write the dictionary Ben-Yehuda consulted, among other sources, Menachem Ben-Saruk's "Machberet Menachem," Marcus Jastrow's modern dictionary of Hebrew and Aramaic of Rabbinic literature, as well as Hanoch Yehuda Kohut's "Aruch HaShalem".

When the Cairo Geniza were revealed, he obtained fragments of the Hebrew text of Ben Sira's book and studied those as well.

Occasionally, Ben-Yehuda also added some Arabic, Greek and Latin words from the Mishna and the Gmara that he believed were necessary (for example the words "אכסניה" (en': Motel) and "אכסדרה" (en': porch) which appear in the dictionary in their Aramaic forms, "אכסניא" and "אכסדרא").

The vocalization of the non-Biblical and non-Talmudic words was mostly based on pointed manuscripts that Ben-Yehuda got access to from those who believed in his work.

In those cases, he did not include all the interpretations written for the word in the dictionary but rather wrote down the meaning that most writers used after the era of the Chazal.

In addition to defining each word, Ben-Yehuda included translation to three languages: English, German, and French.

Ben-Yehuda explained that the translations are needed because many people did not know the Hebrew language well, and therefore, it would be difficult for them to understand the explanations on their own.

This part of his work heavily relied on the book of the German Bible scholar Wilhelm Gesenius, "Thesaurus philologico-criticus linguae Hebraicae et Chaldaicae V.T".

However, Ben-Yehuda dismissed these claims and stated that personal work would improve the quality of the dictionary.

They left with a British police escort to retrieve the draft manuscripts of the dictionary from boxes just before the Arab rioters reached the house.

[22] Entries for the sixth and seventh volumes were edited by the biblical and Talmudic language scholar, Professor Moshe Zvi Segal.

In 1938, the "Association for Completing Eliezer Ben-Yehuda's Hebrew Language Dictionary" was established to raise funds to finance the publication of the missing volumes.

Sometimes, Segal and Tur-Sinai added to Ben-Yehuda's entries information from ancient sources that had been discovered since his death.