Peter Dictionary: A Polish Encyclopaedia of Thought

Abstract PETER DICTIONARY is a large-scale, Polish-language textual repository developed over more than twenty years as a systematic attempt to organize human knowledge alphabetically within a single language. Hosted on CERN’s Zenodo platform, the collection constitutes a durable, citable dataset designed for scholarly, educational, and analytical use. The repository contains a wide range of texts, including scientific, popular, reflective, definitional, and essayistic materials. Rather than focusing on a single discipline, PETER DICTIONARY brings together heterogeneous content unified by a strict alphabetical structure and a consistent editorial methodology. All entries are organized as concise textual units (“index-card texts”), forming an encyclopedic system of concepts and ideas in Polish. Materials originate from different historical periods, intellectual traditions, and linguistic contexts. Over time, selected texts were digitized, translated, normalized, corrected, and editorially harmonized. Where possible, original versions were preserved to allow comparative research. The repository is the result of deliberate, long-term compilation rather than automated data harvesting. From a technical perspective, the dataset consists of DOC and DOCX files organized into directories corresponding to letters of the Polish alphabet. This simple structure enables intuitive navigation and direct use of the texts for reading, analysis, citation, and further scholarly processing. PETER DICTIONARY may serve as a dictionary of concepts, a lexicon of ideas, a research corpus, a teaching resource, or a textual base for projects in natural language processing and machine learning focused on Polish-language data. The repository is released as an open-access resource with a clear citation model based on Zenodo DOI identifiers, supporting transparent and responsible academic reuse.