The academy's primary purpose is to further the "purity, strength, and sublimity of the Swedish language" ("Svenska Språkets renhet, styrka och höghet") (Walshe, 1965).

When the academy was founded, the ballroom was the biggest room in Stockholm that could be heated and thus used in the winter, so the King asked if he could borrow it.

Members of the Academy include writers, linguists, literary scholars, historians and a prominent jurist.

In 1989, Werner Aspenström, Kerstin Ekman and Lars Gyllensten chose to stop participating in the meetings of the academy, over its refusal to express support for Salman Rushdie when Ayatollah Khomeini condemned him to death for The Satanic Verses, and in 2005, Knut Ahnlund made the same decision, as a protest against the choice of Elfriede Jelinek as Nobel laureate for 2004.

[8] According to it, the academy owned financial assets worth 1.58 billion Swedish kronor at the end of 2018 (equal to $170M, €150M, or £130M).

He and his wife were also accused of leaking the names of prize recipients on at least seven occasions so friends could profit from online bets.

Following a vote to stop Frostenson's membership, the three members resigned in protest over the decisions made by the Academy.

"[23]King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden said a reform of the rules may be evaluated, including the introduction of the right to resign in respect of the current lifelong membership of the committee.

[25] On 19 November, the Swedish Academy added five temporary external members to help its five-strong Nobel Committee in their deliberations for the 2019 and 2020 awards: author and literary translator Gun-Britt Sundstrom; publisher Henrik Petersen; and literary critics Mikaela Blomqvist, Rebecka Karde and Kristoffer Leandoer.

[26] Just after two weeks, two of the newly added external members, Sundstrom and Leandoer, left the committee, with the latter saying the work to reform the scandal-hit Swedish Academy was taking too long.

"I leave my job in the Nobel Committee because I have neither the patience nor the time to wait for the result of the work to change that has been started," Leandoer said.

In addition to the dictionaries the Academy has also published a four-volume grammar of the Swedish language (Svenska Akademiens grammatik, SAG) aimed at researchers, linguists and university students among others, as well as a single-volume counterpart for those requiring something less comprehensive (Svenska Akademiens språklära, SAS).

[30][31] Swedish: Stora Priset, literally the Great Prize, was instituted by King Gustav III.

It has been awarded to, among others, Selma Lagerlöf (1904 and 1909), Herbert Tingsten (1966), Astrid Lindgren (1971), Evert Taube (1972) and Tove Jansson (1994).