Ethnonyms play an important role in acquiring more information on early Hungarian history, however, there are several issues concerning Hungarian settlement in the Carpathian Basin that have remained unexplained up until the present day. Therefore it is vitally necessary to study oikonyms derived from ethnonyms in the Old Hungarian Era, which represent a valuable source of information. Such a work of monographic size should embrace all available data. The author set herself the aim to collect the oikonyms from the earliest time of the Hungarian Conquest (895) until 1526 (the end of the Old Hungarian Era). The oikonyms of the Carpathian Basin with ethnonyms as components summarized in this systematized collection have been preserved in archives of charters and documents, county monographs, family archives, works on historical geography and other source publications. Data on 7,619 occurrences of 1,352 name forms of 943 settlements are published here.
The basic principle that governed the collecting work was that only those ethnonyms should be regarded as such which, to our knowledge, were used by Hungarian speakers of the age for for naming different ethnic groups (avar ‘Avar’, bajor ‘Bavarian’, besenyő ‘Pecheneg’, bolgár ‘Bulgarian’, böszörmény ‘Islamite in Hungary’, cigány ‘Gypsy’, cseh ‘Czech’, görög ‘Greek’, horvát ‘Croatian’, jász ‘a Caucasian ethnic group’, káliz ‘Khaliz’, kazár ‘Khazar’, komán ‘Coman’, korontál ‘Carinthian’, kölpény ‘Culpin’, kun ‘Cumanian’, lengyel ‘Polish’, magyar ‘Hungarian’, maróc ~ marót ~ morva ‘Moravian’, nándor ‘Danube Bulgarian’, német ‘German’, oláh ‘Wallachian’, olasz ‘Italian’, orosz ‘Russian’, örmény ‘Armenian’, polány ~ polyák ‘ethnic Polish’, rác ‘Serbian Slavic’, román ‘Wallachian’, sváb ‘Schwabian, ethnic German in Hungary’, szász ‘Saxon’, székely ‘Sekler’, szerb ‘Serbian’, szerecseny ‘Saracen’, tatár ‘Tatar’, tót ‘ethnic Slovak in Hungary’, török ‘Turkish’, úz ‘Ogouz’, várkony ‘Varhun, Avar ethnic group’, zsidó ‘Jewish’).
In one dictionary entry there are chronologically arranged data on each settlement and with its different allomorphs in authentic transliteration faithful to the original form. The ethnonyms are printed in alphabetical order. The author applied certain onomatosystematical aspects to the publication of the names. Settlement names with ethnonyms as their components fall into five basic structural types. These types and the settlement names corresponding to them are to be found in the following order: 1. the ethnonym occurs in its basic form as the settlement name. 2. The ethnonym occurs in a derived form as the settlement name. 3. The ethnonym is compounded with a geographical common word in as the name of the settlement name. 4. The ethnonym occurs as an attribute in the settlement name: 4a. it has no name pair, 4b. it has an ethnonymic attributive pair, 4c. it has an attributive pair which is not an ethnonym. 5. The ethnonym is compounded with a geographical common word which, however, does not denote a settlement.
A linguistic presentation of the names contained in the dictionary with special regard to toponymic typology can be found in the book Etnonimák a régi magyar településnevekben [Ethnonyms in old Hungarian settlement names] (Anita Rácz, Debrecen, 2016).