cstr/grundwortschatz-voc-de

WortUniversum German Vocabulary Database

Status: published at cstr/grundwortschatz-voc-de (GPL-3.0). The shipped SQLite asset lives at assets/grundwortschatz.db.gz in the WortUniversum / words-universe repository; this dataset is its CC-BY-SA→GPL-3.0 re-distribution form. Rebuild

• re-push with pipeline/build_hf_datasets.py --upload.

Dataset summary

A curated, enriched lexical database of 10,450 German lemmas covering the primary-school Grundwortschatz (basic vocabulary) used across German Bundesländer, with extensive per-word annotation including:

• definitions, IPA, inflections, hyphenation
• example sentences (~24,500)
• English translations (~27,500)
• ConceptNet semantic relations
• OpenThesaurus / OdeNet synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, meronyms
• multi-corpus frequency rank (HermitDave / Buchmeier / Leipzig / Leeds)
• DWDS Häufigkeitsklasse (7-level frequency band 0–6)
• childLex age-graded norms (Klasse 1-2 / 3-4 / 5-6 frequency)
• dual spelling-pattern taxonomies (6-cat detailed + 5-cat broad)
• per-Bundesland source attribution and per-Bundesland orthographic-pattern category labels
• Wikipedia-derived common-misspelling pairs

The dataset is built bottom-up from CC-BY-SA-4.0 and GPL-3.0 upstream sources; see License & attribution below.

Languages

• de (German) — primary, all lemma content
• en (English) — translations only

Dataset structure

The dataset is shipped as a SQLite database (grundwortschatz.db.gz, ~19 MB compressed, ~122 MB uncompressed). It is also exportable to Parquet via the bundled converter (see Loading, below).

Tables

words (10,450 rows)

Column	Type	Description
id	INTEGER PK	Surrogate key
original_id	TEXT UNIQUE	Stable pre-build identifier
word	TEXT	Surface form (may be inflected)
lemma	TEXT	Canonical lemma
article	TEXT	der / die / das for nouns
genus	TEXT	grammatical gender
word_type	TEXT	spaCy POS-coarsened category
grade_level	INTEGER	1–6, NRW Grundwortschatz / DWDS Goethe-derived
audio_path	TEXT	(optional) audio asset key
frequency_json	TEXT (JSON)	Per-corpus frequency / rank — see below
enrichment_json	TEXT (JSON)	Definitions, IPA, examples, inflections, syn/ant, hyper/hypo, ConceptNet, OpenThesaurus, spelling-pattern taxonomies, misspelling pairs
metadata_json	TEXT (JSON)	Source attribution, per-Bundesland category labels, spaCy morphology

translations (27,587 rows)

Column	Type	Description
id	INTEGER PK	Surrogate key
word_id	INTEGER FK → words.id	Parent lemma
lang_code	TEXT	ISO 639-1, e.g. en
translation	TEXT	Target translation

examples (24,471 rows)

Column	Type	Description
id	INTEGER PK	Surrogate key
word_id	INTEGER FK → words.id	Parent lemma
sentence	TEXT	German example sentence

search_index (FTS5 virtual table)

Full-text search index over words.word, words.lemma, and aggregated translations. Backed by words table content (content=words).

Key JSON fields

frequency_json

{
  "buchmeier":  {"rank": 223,  "frequency": 14405},      // EN Wiktionary user namespace (Matthias Buchmeier)
  "hermit":     {"rank": 197,  "frequency": 95349},      // HermitDave / OpenSubtitles 2018
  "leipzig":    {"rank": 644},                            // Wortschatz Leipzig (rank only)
  "leeds":      {"rank": 367,  "frequency": 192.03},     // Leeds Corpora
  "dwds":       {"frequenzklasse": 4, "wortklasse": "Substantiv"},  // 7-level band 0-6
  "childlex":   {"age1_freq_norm": 679.4, "age2_freq_norm": 627.1, "age3_freq_norm": 605.4}
                                                          // childLex norms by age band
}

enrichment_json

{
  "primary_pos": "noun",
  "primary_lemma": "Mutter",
  "definitions": ["weiblicher Elternteil …", "weibliches Tier …", …],
  "inflections": [{"form_text": "Mütter", "tags": "nominative, plural"}, …],
  "pronunciation": [{"ipa": "[ˈmʊtɐ]", "audio": "De-Mutter.ogg"}, …],
  "examples":  [{"text": "Sie ist die Mutter von zwei Kindern.", "ref": "...", "year": 2017}, …],
  "hyphenation": ["Mut-ter"],
  "expressions": [{"expression": "bei Mutter Grün schlafen"}, …],
  "proverbs":    [{"proverb": "Vorsicht ist die Mutter der Porzellankiste"}, …],
  "synonyms":    ["Mama", "Mutti", …],
  "antonyms":    ["Vater", "Kind", …],
  "hypernyms":   [{"hypernym_word": "Elternteil"}, …],
  "hyponyms":    [{"hyponym_word": "Großmutter"}, …],
  "conceptnet":  [{"relation": "RelatedTo", "target": "bemuttern", "weight": 2.0}, …],
  "openThesaurus": [{"synonyms": [...], "associations": [...], "categories": [...]}, …],
  "wiktionary_translations": [{"lang": "Englisch", "word": "mother", …}, …],

  "spellingStrategy":          ["doppelkonsonant", "grossschreibung"],
  "spellingStrategyPrimary":   "doppelkonsonant",
  "spellingExplanation":       "Nach einem kurzen Selbstlaut steht der doppelte Mitlaut zwischen den Silben: „Mut-ter". Du hörst ihn nur einmal.",
  "spellingStrategySource":    "principle_based_v3",
  "nrwLinguisticFeatures":     ["Artikel.die", "morphematisches Prinzip.Umlautung.ü", …],
  "commonLearnerErrors":       [{"error": "Mütterr", "source": "wiki_haeufige_falschschreibungen"}]
}

Spelling-strategy taxonomy (science-grounded — see pipeline/voc-de/SPELLING_STRATEGY_SPEC.md):

• spellingStrategy / spellingStrategyPrimary — one or more of 7 neutral linguistic categories, each mapping to an orthographic principle of German (Eisenberg/Fuhrhop, Maas, Gallmann, Schmidt/Fuhrhop, the amtliches Regelwerk, and the basic-grapheme vs. orthographic-marker idea associated with Günther Thomé — principles/ideas only, not his catalogued grapheme inventory): klangtreu (phonographisch / Basisgraphem), doppelkonsonant (Schärfung — all short-vowel doublings, Tasse=Mann), dehnung (long-vowel marking: Dehnungs-h, aa/ee/oo, ie, silbentrennendes-h), verwandt (Stammkonstanz: Auslautverhärtung + Umlaut), morphem (prefix/suffix/separable particle/noun compound), merkwort (etymological exception: v→[f], ch→[k]), grossschreibung (nouns).
• spellingExplanation — a per-word German explanation of the strategy (e.g. „Verlängere: Mann → Männer"; „zusammengesetzt: Haus + Tür"), with a category template fallback.

Derived algorithmically from each word's own enrichment (hyphenation, inflections, IPA) by spelling_strategy_classifier.py (spellingStrategySource: "principle_based_v3"). The nrwLinguisticFeatures field is kept as provenance. (The earlier worksheet-fitted taxonomy and its spellingPatterns dual view were removed.)

metadata_json

{
  "sources": ["A1", "BUCHMEIER", "BW1", "HERMIT", "NRW422",
              "BERLIN", "BRANDENBURG", "HESSEN", "RHEINLAND_PFALZ",
              "BAYERN", "NIEDERSACHSEN", "SCHLESWIG_HOLSTEIN"],
  "hessenCategories":          ["Lautgetreue Wörter auf -el",
                                 "Lautgetreue ableitbare Nomen mit Umlautung a – ä"],
  "rheinland_pfalzCategories": ["Lautgetreue Wörter auf -el", …],
  "bayernCategories":          ["Verbindung von Strategien zu den verschiedenen Prinzipien"],
  "schleswig_holsteinCategories": ["Themen-Wortschätze · Im Klassenraum"],

  "averageRank": 3608.5,
  "wiktionaryInflections": [...],
  "derivedTerms": [...],
  "url": "https://www.dwds.de/wb/leiten",
  "verbFormSpacy": "Fin", "numberSpacy": "Plur", …
}

Source attribution (metadata_json.sources)

Each word's sources array contains tokens indicating which upstream wordlists declared this lemma. Distribution across the 10,450 words:

Token	Coverage	Source	License
HERMIT	8,428	HermitDave / OpenSubtitles 2018 frequency list	CC-BY-SA 4.0
BUCHMEIER	7,846	Matthias Buchmeier German frequency list (EN Wiktionary user namespace)	CC-BY-SA 4.0
LEIPZIG	5,970	Wortschatz Leipzig frequency rank	CC-BY (downloadable frequency lists; commercial OK)
LEEDS	4,162	Leeds internet-corpus frequency rank (Sharoff; not the Kelly list)	rank-only (fact); Leeds corpora documented CC-BY
B1	1,801	DWDS Goethe-Zertifikat B1 lemma list	factual reference
HESSEN	1,599	Grundwortschatz Hessen (Hess. Kultusministerium)	§5 UrhG amtliches Werk
NIEDERSACHSEN	1,455	Orientierungswortschatz Niedersachsen (Nds. KuMi, 2015)	§5 UrhG amtliches Werk
RHEINLAND_PFALZ	1,377	Grundwortschatz RLP (Min. f. Bildung Mainz, 2021)	§5 UrhG amtliches Werk
BRANDENBURG	1,341	Grundwortschatz Brandenburg (LISUM, 2024)	CC-BY-SA 4.0
BERLIN	1,338	Berliner Grundwortschatz (LISUM, 2024)	CC-BY-SA 4.0
BAYERN	1,087	Grundwortschatz Bayern (ISB Bayern)	§5 UrhG amtliches Werk
A1	802	DWDS Goethe-Zertifikat A1 lemma list	factual reference
SCHLESWIG_HOLSTEIN	633	Rechtschreib-Grundwortschatz SH (SH MinBuB / IQSH, 2023)	§5 UrhG amtliches Werk
A2	602	DWDS Goethe-Zertifikat A2 lemma list	factual reference
NRW422, NRW111	532	NRW Grundwortschatz (Min. f. Schule u. Bildung NRW)	public administrative
BW1, BW3	774	Baden-Württemberg Grundwortschatz	public administrative
FEHLER100/200/300/400	932	Common-misspelling lists from Menzel 1985 (empirical study)	facts (uncopyrightable)

Per-Bundesland orthographic categories

For words tagged with HESSEN, RHEINLAND_PFALZ, BAYERN, or SCHLESWIG_HOLSTEIN, an additional {bundesland}Categories: [...] array preserves the source publication's own orthographic-pattern classification:

• hessenCategories — 53 categories like Lautgetreue Einsilber, Wörter mit Doppelkonsonanz, Funktionswörter mit Auslautverhärtung, Fremdwörter, Monatsnamen, Merkwörter.
• rheinland_pfalzCategories — 40 categories (mostly mirroring Hessen, per the RLP publication's own attribution).
• bayernCategories — 43 fine-grained orthographem labels: <er>, <el>, <ck>, <ie>, <tz>, <Sp>/<sp>, etc.
• schleswig_holsteinCategories — 59 hierarchical categories: Offene Silben · Wörter mit einfachen und komplexen Anfangsrändern, Themen-Wortschätze · Im Klassenraum, Affixe · Präfixe · Trennbare Verben · ab-, etc.

Algorithmic grade-band signal

The frequency_json.childlex field provides age-graded frequency norms derived from childLex's 10M-token corpus of German children's literature (Schroeder, Würzner, Heister, Geyken & Kliegl 2015):

Field	Age	School level
age1_freq_norm	6–8	Klasse 1–2
age2_freq_norm	9–10	Klasse 3–4
age3_freq_norm	11–12	Klasse 5–6

Values are occurrences per million in age-appropriate reading material. A word that appears only in age3_freq_norm is a candidate for Klasse-5-6-specific vocabulary; a word with declining frequency across age bands (e.g. Apfel: 162.9 → 58.0 → 33.2) is early-grades-skewed.

License & attribution

This dataset is licensed under GNU General Public License v3.0 or later (GPL-3.0-or-later), the strongest copyleft license among its upstream sources.

License-cascade explanation

The dataset incorporates content from sources under both CC-BY-SA-4.0 and GPL-3.0. Per Creative Commons' 2015 v4-compatible decision, CC-BY-SA-4.0 is one-way compatible with GPL-3.0: combined works must be redistributed under GPL-3.0, with attribution preserved for every constituent CC-BY-SA-4.0 source.

Upstream sources

Source	License	Contribution
Deutsches Wiktionary	CC-BY-SA 4.0	Definitions, IPA, inflections, examples, etymology, syn/ant, hyper/hypo
ConceptNet 5.x (DE)	CC-BY-SA 4.0	Semantic relations
OdeNet	CC-BY-SA 4.0	DE WordNet sense data
OpenThesaurus	CC-BY-SA 4.0	Synonym / hypernym / hyponym closure
HermitDave/OpenSubtitles 2018 frequency list	CC-BY-SA 4.0	Frequency signal
Matthias Buchmeier German frequency list	CC-BY-SA 4.0 (Wiktionary)	Frequency signal
Wikipedia "Liste häufiger Rechtschreibfehler"	CC-BY-SA 4.0	Common learner errors
DWDS Lemma-Datenbank	CC-BY-SA 4.0	Häufigkeitsklasse 0-6
childLex 0.17.01	GPL-3.0	Age-graded freq norms (Kl 1-2 / 3-4 / 5-6)
NRW Grundwortschatz (incl. xlsx + Merkwörter + Nachdenkwörter)	public administrative (§5 UrhG) — Min. f. Schule u. Bildung NRW	Grade tags + xlsx-derived spelling-pattern taxonomy
Baden-Württemberg Grundwortschatz	public administrative (§5 UrhG) — KuMi BW	Grade tags
Berliner Grundwortschatz (LISUM 2024)	CC-BY-SA 4.0 explicit	Bundesland tag
Brandenburger Grundwortschatz (LISUM 2024)	CC-BY-SA 4.0 explicit	Bundesland tag
Grundwortschatz Hessen 2021	public administrative (§5 UrhG) — Hess. KuMi	Bundesland tag + orthographic categories
Grundwortschatz Rheinland-Pfalz 2021	public administrative (§5 UrhG) — Min. Bildung RLP	Bundesland tag + orthographic categories
Orientierungswortschatz Niedersachsen 2015	public administrative (§5 UrhG) — Nds. KuMi	Bundesland tag
Grundwortschatz Bayern (LehrplanPLUS)	public administrative (§5 UrhG) — ISB Bayern	Bundesland tag + orthographem categories
Rechtschreib-Grundwortschatz SH 2023	public administrative (§5 UrhG) — SH MinBuB / IQSH	Bundesland tag + hierarchical categories
DWDS Goethe-Zertifikat A1/A2/B1 lemma lists	DWDS API redistribution of Goethe-Institut lists; factual reference	CEFR tags
Common-misspelling lists from Menzel 1985	empirical facts, uncopyrightable	commonLearnerErrors seed
UD German treebanks (UD_German-GSD, UD_German-HDT, etc.)	CC-BY-SA 4.0	Aggregate stats only

Required attributions

When redistributing or citing this dataset, include:

• Wikipedia / Wiktionary / Wikimedia Foundation (CC-BY-SA 4.0)
• ConceptNet (https://conceptnet.io/) — Luminoso Technologies + community
• OdeNet — Universität Hamburg, LT Group
• OpenThesaurus — community / openthesaurus.de
• HermitDave — github.com/hermitdave/FrequencyWords
• Matthias Buchmeier — User:Matthias_Buchmeier/German_frequency_list-* on EN Wiktionary
• Wortschatz Leipzig — Universität Leipzig
• DWDS / BBAW Berlin — "Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (DWDS), CC-BY-SA 4.0"
• childLex — Schroeder, S., Würzner, K.-M., Heister, J., Geyken, A., & Kliegl, R. (2015). childLex: A lexical database of German read by children. Behavior Research Methods, 47(4), 1085–1094. (https://osf.io/tqgjs/)
• NRW: Ministerium für Schule und Bildung des Landes NRW
• Baden-Württemberg: Kultusministerium Baden-Württemberg
• Berlin / Brandenburg: Landesinstitut für Schule und Medien Berlin-Brandenburg (LISUM)
• Hessen: Hessisches Kultusministerium
• Rheinland-Pfalz: Ministerium für Bildung Rheinland-Pfalz
• Niedersachsen: Niedersächsisches Kultusministerium
• Bayern: Staatsinstitut für Schulqualität und Bildungsforschung München (ISB)
• Schleswig-Holstein: Ministerium für Allgemeine und Berufliche Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kultur des Landes SH; mit Mitwirkung von IQSH und der Europa-Universität Flensburg
• Menzel (1985): Rechtschreibunterricht. Praxis und Theorie. Seelze: Friedrich-Verlag.

Changes made from upstream

Per CC-BY-SA-4.0's "indicate changes" requirement and GPL-3.0's notification of modification:

• Selection / filtering: We retain only ~10,450 of Wiktionary's ~100k German lemmas, filtered through a multi-corpus intersection of common-vocabulary signals. Selection criteria documented in the build pipeline.
• Schema flattening: Wiktionary's nested JSONL structure is flattened into the words.enrichment_json blob with per-word fields documented above.
• Merging: NRW grade tags (Klasse 1-6) are merged into words.grade_level from the NRW Grundwortschatz xlsx; Bundesländer-specific category labels are merged from the respective state publications.
• Algorithmic derivation: Spelling-pattern taxonomies (spellingStrategy, spellingPatterns) are derived algorithmically from the NRW xlsx feature paths, with a surface-heuristic fallback for words outside NRW.
• Re-encoding: childLex .dat files were re-encoded from Latin-1 to UTF-8 for storage.
• Source-attribution tokens: Bundesländer membership is recorded as discrete tokens in metadata_json.sources to enable per-state filtering.

Loading

SQLite (native)

import sqlite3, gzip
with gzip.open("grundwortschatz.db.gz", "rb") as fi:
    with open("grundwortschatz.db", "wb") as fo:
        fo.write(fi.read())

con = sqlite3.connect("grundwortschatz.db")
con.row_factory = sqlite3.Row
for r in con.execute("SELECT word, lemma, frequency_json FROM words WHERE word_type = 'verb' LIMIT 5"):
    print(r["word"], r["lemma"])

datasets / Parquet

A Parquet export is produced by the bundled converter pipeline/voc-de/14_convert_db_to_sqflite.py and made available as companion files alongside the SQLite asset.

from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("cstr/grundwortschatz-voc-de")
print(ds["words"][0])

Pedagogical / didactic context

This database powers WortUniversum, an orthography and grammar learning app targeting German-speaking primary-school children (Klasse 1–6) and language learners.

The spelling-strategy taxonomy (spellingStrategy list + spellingStrategyPrimary + a per-word spellingExplanation) is grounded in the orthographic principles of German (phonographisch / silbisch / morphologisch / morphematisch / syntaktisch), per Eisenberg & Fuhrhop, Maas, Gallmann, Schmidt/Fuhrhop, the amtliches Regelwerk, and the basic-grapheme vs. orthographic-marker idea associated with Günther Thomé (principles/ideas only, not his catalogued grapheme inventory). Seven neutral linguistic categories: klangtreu, doppelkonsonant, dehnung, verwandt, morphem, merkwort, grossschreibung. Derived algorithmically from each word's own enrichment (hyphenation, inflections, IPA). Full spec + citations: pipeline/voc-de/SPELLING_STRATEGY_SPEC.md.

The childLex age-graded norms and Bundesländer category labels together provide an algorithmic basis for grade-band classification: a word appearing only in childLex Age 3 (ages 11-12) and not in any Klasse 1-2 wordlist is a strong Klasse 5-6 candidate.

Citation

If you use this dataset in academic work, please cite:

@dataset{wortuniversum_grundwortschatz_de_2026,
  title  = {WortUniversum --- German primary-school Grundwortschatz with multi-corpus enrichment},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/cstr/grundwortschatz-voc-de},
  note   = {SQLite/Parquet dataset combining Wiktionary, ConceptNet, OdeNet,
            OpenThesaurus, DWDS, childLex, and German Bundesländer Grundwortschätze
            under GPL-3.0. See dataset card for full attribution.}
}

Please also cite the relevant upstream sources for any specific field you use (e.g. childLex citation for the frequency_json.childlex norms; DWDS citation for frequency_json.dwds).

Project links

• Build pipeline + scripts: https://github.com/CrispStrobe/words-universe/tree/main/pipeline/voc-de
• App that consumes this dataset: WortUniversum (Flutter, proprietary)
• Issue tracker / source corrections: GitHub Issues on the words-universe repo