There used to be (sometimes rather insane) niche dictionaries like reverse dictionaries, specific terminology dictionaries, hyper-specific ones like "A dictionary of "Names for inhabitants"[1] that catalogued 6000 local/specific names for people of different places and so on.
Some of them have moved online, but more often than not they are maintained by people who just collected some words on a page (like all the "chose the name for your baby, 10 000 names" lists) with no system or context.
And the world is ever so slightly worse off because of this.
[1] Yup. Published in the USSR. See for yourself here, in Russian: https://www.booksite.ru/fulltext/slovnazvanii/text.pdf This stems from the fact that it's not immediately obvious how to form a proper adjective from a place name in Russian
There used to be (sometimes rather insane) niche dictionaries like reverse dictionaries, specific terminology dictionaries, hyper-specific ones like "A dictionary of "Names for inhabitants"[1] that catalogued 6000 local/specific names for people of different places and so on.
Some of them have moved online, but more often than not they are maintained by people who just collected some words on a page (like all the "chose the name for your baby, 10 000 names" lists) with no system or context.
And the world is ever so slightly worse off because of this.
[1] Yup. Published in the USSR. See for yourself here, in Russian: https://www.booksite.ru/fulltext/slovnazvanii/text.pdf This stems from the fact that it's not immediately obvious how to form a proper adjective from a place name in Russian