The big Norwegian encyclopedia

Store Norske leksikon (SNL) – The big Norwegian encyclopedia is a free and complete encyclopedia written by professionals.

Store Norske leksikon is a household name in Norway. This encyclopedia has been the go-to source for information for many years. First on paper and now online.  I use this source a lot, but  I hadn’t thought of presenting it because it is only available in Norwegian. My good friend and fellow genealogist Luci J. Baker Johnson in Seattle, WA,  mentioned it to me. I have now read some articles using Google translate and see that this encyclopedia can be a great source also for non-Norwegian speakers.

Store Norske leksikon is a free and complete encyclopedia written by professionals in Bokmål and Nynorsk. With up to 3 million users a month and 550,000 read articles every day, the encyclopedia is Norway’s largest website for research. The encyclopedia is owned by Norwegian universities and several non-profit foundations/organizations.

From 1978 to 2010, Store Norske leksikon was published on paper by Kunnskapsforlaget, which is owned by Aschehoug and Gyldendal. The articles in the 16 volumes were the result of Gyldendal and Aschehoug merging their previously competing encyclopedias, Gyldendal’s large conversational lexicon and Aschehoug’s conversational lexicon, which had roots dating back to 1906.

Store Norske leksikon builds on the articles in the paper encyclopedia called Aschehoug’s and Gyldendal’s Store Norske leksikon. Today, Store norske leksikon is published by the non-profit publisher Foreningen SNL . The encyclopedia is a pure online product, and there will be no more books on paper.

You can access the encyclopedia here

Also worth noting on this webpage is the link to NORSK BIOGRAFISK LEKSIKON Norwegian biographical lexicon.

Norwegian biographical encyclopedia is a digital version of the paperwork, published in the period 1999–2005. The content of the Norwegian biographical encyclopedia will not be updated.

Both in the web browsers Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge we can use the translate function by right-clicking on an empty space and go to the “translate…” in the menu that appears.