Handwoordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal

The Handwoordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal (HAT), is the best known explanatory dictionary for the Afrikaans language and is generally regarded as authoritative.

Compared to the Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal (WAT) it is a shorter Afrikaans explanatory dictionary in a single volume.

[1] During the 1920s earnest discussions were devoted to the compilation of an Afrikaans dictionary and in March 1926 the erstwhile Nasionale Boekhandel and the government of the day agreed to the publication of a monolingual explanatory dictionary with an extent similar to that of the Dutch Van Dale (a single-volume work) at the time.

J.J. Smith, professor of Afrikaans at the University of Stellenbosch, would be the editor, and the aim was to complete the work within three years.

[2] The discussions, however, did have a positive result: Schoonees accepted the challenge to compile an Afrikaans desk dictionary in his own time.

In spite of Schoonees's enthusiasm and perseverance it soon became apparent that for one person to compile a desk dictionary from scratch in a relatively short time was a very difficult if not impossible task.

du Toit, another co-editor of the WAT, was seconded too, and later the Afrikaans teacher, C. Murray Booysen, joined the team as well.

The first edition of the Verklarende Handwoordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal was published in 1965 under all four names, though by then Booysen had retired for health reasons.

[2] Odendal accepted Perskor's offer and asked the publisher what it considered a realistic time for the completion of the work.

(Here the contribution of Mrs Estelle Odendal should be mentioned, who recorded new and missing words from newspapers, magazines and books the whole time her husband was working on the HAT.)

Also that newspapers and the writers of letters to the press, where the meaning of a word was concerned, regularly quoted the HAT as an authoritative reference.

As in the previous editions particular attention was given to fixed expressions and idioms, elucidated and grouped in a set fashion at the end of a lemma.

To ensure that the HAT stayed in capable hands when he could no longer participate, Odendal proposed to Perskor in the 1990s that it was time to appoint a second, younger editor.

His pre-eminent status as theoretical and practical lexicographer made Rufus H. Gouws, professor in Afrikaans linguistics at the University of Stellenbosch, an excellent choice.

However, one editor would be responsible for a particular aspect from A to Z, such as adding citations, refining the labels, and supplementing and checking computer terms.

HAT4 was published in 2000 by Pearson Education South Africa, a division of Maskew Miller Longman, into which Perskor was incorporated.

As with HAT4 each editor assumed special responsibility for particular aspects of the dictionary as a whole: expanding the etymologies, improving the lemma layout, expanding the abbreviations and moving them to a special section at the back of the book, adding a section of geographical names with their derivatives, refining the labels further, sourcing additional suitable citations, and compiling a complete usage guide for the front matter.

At the launch of HAT5, on 14 September 2005 at the Spier Estate outside Stellenbosch, he was honoured for his more than 30 years of commitment and dedication to the Handwoordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal and bid farewell.

Typographical and spelling errors that were brought to the editors’ attention since the publication of the fifth edition in 2005 were corrected in the electronic dictionary and, in accordance with the Afrikaanse woordelys en spelreëls of the Afrikaans language commission of the SA Academy, certain improvements were applied.

e-HAT 2009 is the first step on the road to a new, improved and comprehensively revised sixth edition of the HAT that is intended to mirror contemporary Afrikaans.

To assist in the preparation of HAT6, Pearson in 2012 appointed Fred Pheiffer, a former colleague of Luther and likewise co-editor of the abovementioned two Pharos dictionaries.