On the occasion of the International Congress of Romance Studies in Bucarest in 1968, Georges Straka initiated a common projet based at Laval University under the direction of Frankwalt Möhren.
When in 1975 the Conseil des arts du Canada withdrew financial support the DEAF moved back to Heidelberg, F. Möhren having saved the so far established card file while all other materials where lost for future work.
From 2007 on, with Thomas Städtler as head of the project, two correlating goals were pursued: exploiting those parts of the Old French lexicon which had been rather neglected in historical lexicography so far and creating a powerful database meeting the DEAF's specific demands.
However it systematically includes encyclopedic information in semantic analysis and above all by providing a great number of citations serving to illustrate and corroborate senses given in (usually scholastic) definitions.
Based on this collection the DEAF nomenclature (macrostructure) counts roughly 85′000 entries grouped by word families in order to emphasise their etymological relationship.
Besides critical investigation and identifying of the etymon which includes neighbour languages, this section gives a brief description of the individual word history and discusses controversial viewpoints.
Due to its highly scientific and rather linguistic approach to the Old French lexicon and its reliable internal structure but also for its lexical coverage the DEAF is one of the most important works of historical lexicography.
By considering not only text corpora but also tertiary sources such as the Altfranzösisches Wörterbuch by Adolf Tobler and Erhard Lommatzsch,[5] the Godefroy[6] or the FEW[7] and by including the entire alphabet the DEAF constitutes a networking enterprise unequalled in the field so far.
[4] This powerful supplement created and constantly elaborated by Frankwalt Möhren forms indeed an integral part of the DEAF project as a whole and is not only published as a book but also freely accessible online (DEAFBiblél[4]).