That was one of the questions hanging in the air as staff, students, language practitioners, and friends of Afrikaans gathered at the University of the Free State (UFS) to celebrate 100 years of the
Woordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal (WAT). For many people, a dictionary is something that sits quietly on a shelf or appears in a search bar when you need to check a spelling. The evening's conversations revealed a very different picture: a dictionary as a record of people's lives, histories, stories, and ways of speaking.
A hundred years of the WAT called for more than a passing mention. According to
Dr Francois Smith, Head of the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch, German and French, it is important for the department to properly celebrate such a significant national achievement and to give it the recognition it deserves. “What makes the WAT worthy of such a celebration is the way it seeks to include the many voices of Afrikaans. It is a comprehensive dictionary that reflects Afrikaans in all its breadth, length, depth, and nuances, encompassing its varieties and registers."
Compiling the WAT, Dr Smith said, is much like building a cathedral. A century after work began, the project is nearing completion. The team has completed the letter U and is currently working on V. If all goes according to plan, the first edition of the WAT will reach Z in 2028.
Millions of words, the work of generations
Also speaking at the event was
Prof Vasu Reddy, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research, Innovation and Postgraduate Studies at the UFS. Having studied Afrikaans and Dutch as a student in the 1980s – and remaining, in his own words, "very fond of Afrikaans as a language central to our shared linguistic histories" – Prof Reddy described the WAT as one of South Africa's most significant long-term scholarly projects, representing "a century of intellectual commitment, cultural memory, and scholarly excellence".
He emphasised that the WAT is far more than a dictionary. "The development of Afrikaans, and especially its continued cultivation, enriches South Africa's broader intellectual and cultural landscape," he said.
He noted that celebrating Afrikaans does not come at the expense of multilingualism. Instead, it reinforces the principle that every language deserves recognition, development, and scholarly investment. "As universities, we have a responsibility to support language scholarship that is inclusive, innovative, critical, and future-orientated.”
Reflecting on the role of dictionaries, Prof Reddy described them as "an archive of human experience and a repository of collective memory". The WAT, he said, reminds us that language is one of humanity's most sophisticated knowledge systems, recording how people think, communicate, evolve, and love their language.
From Prof Reddy’s reflections on language's role in society, the focus shifted to the people and stories behind the dictionary itself. The discussion moved easily between scholarly history and lighter moments. At one point, Prof Van Huyssteen remarked that Dr Louw – an ‘accidental lexicographer’ who returned to the WAT as Editor-in-Chief after a 17-year career with Oxford University Press – had worked on one of the shortest letters in the dictionary, Q. Dr Louw responded with a smile: "I am the only associate editor who can say they completed an entire letter in the dictionary."
Behind the humour lies an enormous body of work. The online WAT currently contains around 257 000 lemmas, or headwords, from A to U, spread across nearly 18 million words of text. Yet one of the evening's most fascinating stories was not about technology or databases, but about people.
Long before computers, WAT editors realised that they could not possibly know every word used by Afrikaans speakers. Inspired by the Oxford English Dictionary, they appealed to the public for help. Volunteers were sent index cards and asked to record words they encountered, along with example sentences and source information. Over several decades, approximately 3,5 million handwritten cards were submitted to the WAT. Today, these records have been digitised, but they remain a remarkable example of collective effort.
The foundation on which the WAT continues to build
Behind those millions of cards stand generations of editors who have dedicated their careers to the dictionary. Asked which predecessors left the deepest impression on him, Dr Louw immediately mentioned Dr PC Schoonees and his successor, Dr Frikkie Snijman. He also paid tribute to Dr Frikkie Lombard and Dr Johan du Plessis, recalling them as exceptionally gifted editors with an uncanny ability to spot mistakes. With the finish line finally in sight, their contribution remains part of the foundation on which the WAT continues to build.
The conversation also touched on the many voices that make up Afrikaans. Dr Louw noted that the WAT has long included words from varieties of Afrikaans that were often overlooked, while recent projects have expanded its coverage of Cape Afrikaans and Gariep Afrikaans, also known as Orange River Afrikaans.
The conversation about linguistic diversity ultimately pointed to a larger question: what does the WAT represent after 100 years of documenting Afrikaans?
"The WAT stands today as both a cathedral of scholarship and a house with many rooms: a monumental achievement built across generations, yet one that continues to welcome new voices, new meanings, and new possibilities. Its first hundred years remind us that language is not merely a record of who we have been, but an invitation to imagine who we might yet become," observed Prof Reddy.
The evening ended on a particularly memorable note. Speaking about Muslim Afrikaans and its contribution to the language, Dr Louw shared his favourite Afrikaans word: tramakassie. Tracing its origins, he explained that it can be understood to mean: ‘I receive your love.’ "So, to all of you here at the university this evening, the WAT receives your love. Tramakassie."
After a century of collecting words, it felt like a fitting way to say thank you.