Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI – CNR)

The Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI) is a research institute of Italy's Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), formally established in 1985 and rooted in a project that originated at the Accademia della Crusca in 1965. Its mandate is to compile the Vocabolario Storico Italiano — the Historical Dictionary of the Italian language — and it remains headquartered at the Accademia della Crusca in Florence.

OVI's principal ongoing output is the Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (TLIO), the Old Italian section of the Historical Dictionary covering all Italian-language texts from the earliest documents through the end of the fourteenth century. This work is grounded in the Corpus TLIO, a continuously expanding textual database of approximately 2,000 Old Italian texts totalling roughly 21.8 million words. Beyond the TLIO, OVI freely publishes the BTV (Bibliografia dei Testi Volgari), the most extensive bibliographic collection of Old Italian data, and is collaborating with the Accademia della Crusca on a new Vocabolario Dantesco.

To support its lexicographic mission, OVI has developed its own specialised software — notably GATTO (Gestione degli Archivi Testuali del Tesoro delle Origini) and Pluto — and provides ICT-based services to humanities researchers. All OVI databases and dictionaries are published online in open-access format. In the long term, the institute aims to extend its Historical Dictionary coverage beyond the medieval period to encompass Italian through the twentieth century, evolving its tools in step with advances in philological, historical-linguistic, and computational research.