Geographical appellatives (common words) as phrases denoting places constitute one of the fundamental sets of the Hungarian vocabulary and name system (or of the vocabularies and name systems of any other language), since no other elements are suitable for referring to classes of (geographical) objects and places. Understandably, the analysis of geographical common words has always played a significant role in toponomastics. Geographical common words can be scientifically described only if the data derived from the given group of words are arranged in the best possible way, thus the present publication can be regarded as a complement that, besides its practical aspect of helping toponomastics, provides possibilities for further research. The material available makes the grouping of toponyms into types more exact, which is a precondition for the linguistic analysis of toponymic systems. Apart from onomastic research, the dictionary can be used to gain insights into the philological, etymological, and areal study of geographical common words.

The book entitled Hungarian geographical common words can be defined as a dialect dictionary of the spoken language; that is why the authors primarily considered the Új magyar tájszótár [New Hungarian dialect dictionary] (1–5. Budapest, 1979–2010), which represents a wide section of the 20^th century Hungarian language together with the corpus of regional words recorded between 1890 and 1960, as a reference point. The material contained in the present dictionary embraces a wider scope of vocabulary items because numerous regional dialect dictionaries have been published in the last decades that have completed complemented the Új magyar tájszótár. The authors considered to be have been one of their most important tasks to relieve researchers from reviewing several sources that treat this word group, and to describe the various items that appear in the vocabulary as if this task had been completed by the researcher.

After extracting data from the Új magyar tájszótár, the authors processed more than seventy other sources (mostly glossaries and from some dialect dictionaries and studies). The nearly 3,500 entries of the complete collection of geographical common words contain more than 18,000 data.