I want to purchase a good dictionary which will include also words that aren't used in nowadays German language.
I presume I need something that will include words from the last 200-500 years.
I looked at Amazon's website, the first page offers a dictionary by Collins, but it says that it's contemporary, so how much does it include ancient and not used words?
Have a look at the Zedler – Johann Heinrich Zedlers Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon Aller Wissenschafften und Künste (sic), edited 1732–1754 on about 63.000 pages.
Of course you will not find this for sale, or if you do you must be a rich man to buy it. But you can access it online, thanks to a project of two German libraries and financing by the German Reserach Foundation (DFG).
I tried and looked up Sinus, as this is obviously a word they would have used (independent of them using German, French, or Latin for their correspondence). There you find, even with a nice picture of a circle and various lines:
Sinus, Sinus rectus, sinus naturalis, eines Bogens oder Winckels, heisset in der Trigonometrie die halbe Sehne des doppelten Bogens. Es sei A C die Sehne des Bogens ABC, oder auch des grossen A G C: so ist die Helfte davon A E der Sinus des halben Bogens A B, oder auch des halben Bogens A G, ingleichen des Winckels A D B oder auch des Winckels A G. Nemlich wenn man aus der Spitze eines Winckels D [...]
By using Wörterbuchnetz, you will have an access of almost all old dictionaries.
Some of the famous "ancient" dictionaries are;
Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm
Goethe-Wörterbuch
Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch von Benecke, Müller, Zarncke
In one of the provided dictionaries, you will certainly find, what you are looking for.
There is available on Amazon.com an inexpensive Amazon Kindle edition of an old (1891) German-English dictionary that while perhaps not being just exactly what is being looked for might, nonetheless, be of interest.
The Amazon Kindle edition is an old, 461-page, German to English dictionary available to the public on the English language Amazon for the rather low cost of USD 7.00. There is no shipping charge for Amazon's Kindle books, as the Kindle books are transmitted by Internet directly to the user's (no-cost) Kindle PC app.
The dictionary that I'm referring to is an English translation of the fourth German edition of Friedrich Kluge's Etymological Dictionary of the German Language, published in London by George Bell & Sons, in 1891. This translation of Kluge's work is by John Francis Davis, D.Lit, M.A.
There are several other offerings of this book on Amazon, but the book with the mottled brown cover which offers Amazon's "Look Inside! " feature is, I believe, the only one worth obtaining.
But first, be aware that an etymological dictionary differs from a conventional dictionary in that included with a word's definition are the roots (e.g. OHG = Old High German, etc), derivations, and equivalencies of the word in related languages.
Davis' translation begins with a brief one-page "Translators Preface" which summarizes the types of language dictionaries the dictionary's author (Kluge) consulted in composing his dictionary.
The translator's preface is followed by a more or less conventional two-page "Author's Preface" (Freidrich Kluge), dated "Strasburg July 1883 - Jena, October 1888", in which Kluge gives overall credit to specific individuals and others who helped him to compile and complete his dictionary.
The author's preface is followed by an interesting seven-page "Introduction" in which he expounds philologically on the roots and origins of various languages on what he calls "the mother tongue", and how the mother tongue has been impacted over the centuries by population change, migration, and evangelical missionaries.
The "Introduction" is then followed by a two-page, double-column, "List of Abbreviations", the necessary abbreviations used in the dictionary for grammar and syntax terms, and the names of the languages referenced in the body of the dictionary, as for example "Prak.= Prakrit"; "Amor.= Amorican"; "Americ.= American"; "E.= English", and so forth.
The alphabetized 'dictionary-content' of the dictionary then follows the preliminary materials; German words are defined (briefly), and their etymology explained, most of them in greater detail than found in normal dictionaries.
An "Additions and Corrections" page with corrections to seven words in the dictionary follows after the conclusion of the dictionary entries.
Kluge's dictionary is ended by an unusual index, four columns wide, titled "Index to the words quoted from Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and English, showing the German word under which they will be found." The index starts with Greek (Old, Middle, and Modern), followed by Latin (Old, Law, and Middle); Italian; French; and English (including Scotch).
An extract from Kluge's dictionary provides an example of the overall style of the definitions are like the entry for:
"Thon, m, 'clay', earlier xxxx ModHG, then xxxx from MidHG and xxxx OHG
(the xxxx represents word variations with Gothic fonts that are not easy to discern without further magnification)
Note: In the early 1930's the character-initial consonants "TH" in words like "thon" were simplified to the single initial consonant "T".
The content of the dictionary does include some words and derivations whose history does go back several hundred and more years; some of the words defined in Kluge's dictionary then do most certainly meet the questioner's criteria for including words "...from the last 200 to 500 years".
For all the good features of Kluge's etymological dictionary, there are drawbacks and disadvantages to the utility and scholarly value of the Kindle edition of this dictionary over a library-quality hardcopy of the book.
Firstly, a good knowledge of Gothic fonts is an absolute necessity for the user, as the dictionary's text font is normally and entirely "Gothic" -- and an older version at that. The exception to the use of the Gothic font is where a font similar to Times Roman is used in parenthetical notes in the way that contemporary usage is with an italic font.
Secondly, and I think perhaps more importantly, expanding the page views to any large size than "full page" is impossible; consequently a large magnifying glass or a page-sized magnifying sheet (available at "Staples" stationary stores) becomes a welcome "viewing-fatigue" solution.
Kluge's book is a good example of the branch of intellectual study called "Philology", where languages (for example) are studied holistically, that is, studied in the context of surrounding variables. Since languages and the words they contain are unavoidably subject to change, to be knowledgeable in studying the works of notable German mathematicians in the original language clearly requires a knowledge and understanding of the changes that have occurred to words in that language over time.
Etymological dictionaries are a great help with obtaining that knowledge and understanding.
