The Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (TLIO) is the first historical dictionary of Old Italian. It is a very new work for several reasons.
First of all, it actually is an on-line dictionary: it not only is published on the Internet(http://tlio.ovi.cnr.it, or http://dizionario.ovi.cnr.it), but also is a dynamic dictionary, the entries of which can be constantly modified, for instance by adding new examples and even new definitions when new texts are added to the Old Italian database, that is the main tool for the compilation. So it is not necessary to compile the entries in a strict alphabetical order: the 17,000 entries that were published (in total) at the end of 2006 (maintaining a pace of 2,000 new entries per year), covered almost completely A- and B-, a good deal of C-E, and F-Z with some hundreds of entries.
Second, the TLIO is a first hand dictionary, that is compiled through a fresh examination of the Old Italian texts. A very large database has been created to this purpose, containing at present 21,779,245 word occurrences out of 1,960 texts, and is currently being developed and enlarged; it is powered by GATTO, a new set of software programs for linguistic and lexicographical purposes that has been created and developed by OVI.
Third, the TLIO is the first Italian historical dictionary which deals with all varieties of Old Italian language, including the so called dialects, provided that the national language do not exist as such before the XVI century; so the texts that are indexed in the Old Italian database are not only florentin and toscan, but also lombard, venitian, sicilian and so on. In the entries, TLIO gives account not only of the chronology, but also of the geographic and linguistic distribution of the first samples, while under each definition the samples of any linguistic variety are put together, in chronological order.
Fourth, TLIO is as well a regular historical dictionary (with definitions and samples quoted in chronological order under the definitions), as, at the same time, an exhaustive database of Old Italian texts, in the sense that from every entry in the dictionary it is possible to display the complete list of samples in the database (the same that has been examined by the editor), thanks to a link to a copy of the Old Italian database searcheable on the web. It must be added that the indexed texts were more or less revised from a philological point of view.
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