The online Yiddish Cultural Dictionary, known in Yiddish as ווילנער ווערטערבוך (Vilner Verterbukh) was initiated in January 2018 by Dovid Katz in Vilnius, Lithuania (first facebook announcement). YCD invites colleagues, students and more general readers to send in words that are missing and of course to let us know about errors of any kind (at the email: info@yiddishculturaldictionary.org). By the summer of 2026, YCD comprised over: 51,000 main entries, a million words of text, 1,700 notes (all in Yiddish) on usage, stylistics, nuance, etymology and the lively debates of today's Yiddish world. To search the notes, please key in to the search box הערה (for notes) and אזהרה (for cautions).

Seeking to complement rather than duplicate, YCD is rooted in descriptivism and variationism rather than normativism and purism, and in traditionalism and search for the Yiddish spirit of things, rather than in reform, radicalism and replacement. It seeks to bridge the frighteningly wide divide between Hasidic (/Haredi) Yiddish (and the remnants of bona fide secular Yiddish) with that of the typical college or community center proverbial Yiddish 101, making a modest contribution toward the reunification of Yiddish in the deeper twenty-first century. YCD implicitly contends that the spirit of the language of the great literary masters of the twentieth century, and of the last generation of pre-Holocaust born speakers, lives on in the inclusive spirit of middle-of-the-road Yiddish stylistics which acknowledges the wings of religious and secular, traditional and radical, and standardist vs. dialect-oriented.

The original wordpress edition at YiddishCultural.Dictionary.org continues alongside the new mobile-friendly, rapid-search YiddishCultural.Dictionary.com. Note that some details, and entire entries (occasionally even groups of entries) are missed by the transfer mechanisms, and are found only in the wordpress original at .org. Please let us know about such issues arising, and the problem will be promptly addressed. The numbers at the bottom of each page of the .com mobile-friendly version are double the number of entries picked up from .org at the time (for now the counter still counts entry name and entry text separately, this will be addressed in due course, alongside some other issues waiting solution when finances enable).

YCD is in principle permanently free (and without log-in) online, and constructed to enable users to browse up and down the page at will as in a traditional print dictionary, in the spirit of finding related items, not to mention Yiddish pearls you were not even looking for. Again, please don't hesitate to drop us an email informing of errors. In the case of typos it's enough to just copy and paste the typo into the email, we'll take it from there.

Please consider making a contribution toward YCD's survival and growth. If you require tax-deductible status in the United States, please write (info@yiddishculturaldictionary.org).