The oldest records of the Hungarian language emerged after the first millennium, which are, however, not extant Hungarian texts but charters or historical works written in Latin with Hungarian elements, mostly toponyms and anthroponyms. These records are prominent sources of Hungarian philology, while they also represent the most ancient attestations of the Uralic languages. Apart from their philological onomastic aspects they also contain essential information for other disciplines engaged in historical studies.

Despite its significance, Hungarian linguistics and onomastics have made very little use of this source material simply because they have not been made available for researchers to be able to use them in a form suitable for study. In the early 21^st century, anthroponyms taken from this source material were already published by Katalin Fehértói in Árpád kori magyar személynévtár [Hungarian Anthroponymic Registry of the Árpád Era] (Budapest, 2003). A similarly thorough study of toponyms, which make up the bulk of the corpus drawn from the charters, also important from philological, onomastic, and historical aspects, have not been studied yet.

By the launch of the series A dictionary of early Hungarian toponyms, researchers from Debrecen have undertaken to fill this gap. The dictionary is intended to display all the toponymic references prior to 1350. The toponymic data are arranged in the entries according to their linguistic components, in which morphological aspects prevail.

The first volume of the A dictionary of early Hungarian toponyms contains the total stock of toponyms of 15 old counties prior to 1350. The editors of the dictionary are planning to continue the publication of the series in the future. It is expected to be published in 5 volumes with its corpus to be made available online for those interested.