In North America and other parts of the world, there are millions of descendants of the nearly 1 million Norwegians who emigrated in the 1800s and early 1900s. In family homes worldwide, there are diaries, letters, and postcards stashed away – historical documents written in a family language long since forgotten. An old letter is like a time capsule, a direct link to the person who wrote it – and can often tell us much more than any old photo. Whether you are studying old Norwegian documents or are interested in the Norwegian language, Einar Haugen’s Norwegian-English dictionary may be the tool for you. Einar Haugen’s Norwegian-English dictionary was first published in 1965 by the Norwegian publishing house Universitetsforlaget, and it is still in print. The dictionary includes older style and dialect words. Words like laup, tjuagutt, budrått, and eldhus will not appear in more contemporary dictionaries. Here, at norwegianroots.no, we sometimes use the book when stumbling upon unfamiliar Norwegian dialect words in Norwegian texts; we are Norwegians using Einar Haugen’s dictionary to understand Norwegian – via English. How about that?

In North America and other parts of the world, there are millions of descendants of the nearly 1...