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GermaNet - An Introduction

What is GermaNet?

GermaNet is a lexical-semantic net that relates German nouns, verbs, and adjectives semantically by grouping lexical units that express the same concept into synsets and by defining semantic relations between these synsets. GermaNet has much in common with the English WordNet® and can be viewed as an on-line thesaurus or a light-weight ontology.


GermaNet has been developed and maintained within various projects at the Division of General and Computational Linguistics, at the University of Tübingen since 1997. It has been integrated into the EuroWordNet (EWN), a multilingual lexical-semantic database.


If you are looking for a more in-depth introduction of GermaNet and EuroWordNet, we recommend Chapter 6.2 in Lothar Lemnitzer and Claudia Kunze: Computerlexikographie. Gunter Narr Verlag 2007. You can either download this text (note that it is written in German) or access the entire book online. For more detailed research papers related to GermaNet, please have a look at the publications section of this website.



Current Size of GermaNet

The following is an up-to-date statistics of GermaNet's version 14.0 contents (release April 2019):


  • Synsets: 136263
  • Lexical units: 175000
  • Literals: 159359
  • 1,28 lexical units per synset
  • Number of conceptual relations: 150003
  • Number of lexical relations: 12203 (synonymy excluded)
  • Number of split compounds: 91106
  • Number of Interlingual Index (ILI) records: 28565 (separate download)
  • Number of Wiktionary sense descriptions: 29549 (separate download)


How do I get the data?

GermaNet is free for academic users but you have to sign a license. To download the license and learn more about our "R&D" and commercial licenses, please go to the license page.