The Dictionary of Contemporary Basque (DCB) is a project designed to make available online a dictionary of Basque as it is used today, based on prose (books and newspaper articles) written between 2000 and 2007 and selected for its linguistic quality. The 25.1 million-word language corpus comprising these texts is entitled Ereduzko Prosa Gaur (Contemporary Reference prose), and is available online: https://www.ehu.eus/euskara-orria/euskara/ereduzkoa/.

Based on this corpus, the Institute compiled its first dictionary. Called the Dictionary of Standard Basque in Contemporary Prose (Hiztegi Batua Euskal Prosan), it compares the lexicon used by 21st century writers according to the Contemporary Reference prose corpus available at https://www.ehu.eus/euskara-orria/euskara/ereduzkoa/, with the unified lexicon published by the Academy of the Basque Language in 2000 (http://www.euskaltzaindia.net/hiztegibatua/).

In the DCB on this page, you can look up words under the first 17 letters after C. The remaining letters will be added in the months to come. These letters (C,D,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,Ñ,O,P,Q,R,S) account for a total of 288.746 examples. Each entry consists of a definition plus different meanings of the word. Clicking on the word opens up a number of examples for each of the meanings. Below this part, without leaving the page, there is further information about the same entry in the form of word groups that authors repeatedly use. Clicking on these word groups accesses the original sentences, so that it is always possible to see the lexical entry in context. Finally, in a third section on the same page, the use of this lexicon can be compared with the unified lexicon published by the Academy of the Basque Language in 2000 (http://www.euskaltzaindia.net/hiztegibatua/).

Launched in 2008, after fifteen years of work, the first version of the project was completed in January 2023.