UIC-RailLexic terminology - Dictionary of Railway Terms

Background to the UIC dictionary 

The international organisation of railway authorities, UIC (Union internationale des chemins de fer), is based in Paris. A terminology expert group has been working for many years to develop a multilingual vocabulary that fills bookshelfs under the name of 'UIC dictionary'. As the railway operation is cross-border per se, clear communication between the national organisations became necessary at a very early stage. RailLexic can thus be cited as a good example of how terminology work can be successful across borders - a total of 28 railways have participated in the project. 

The publication of dictionaries focusing on regional topics reached a preliminary peak in the 1990s. On the market were UIC dictionaries of the language group North (Scandinavian and Finnish languages), Southern Europe (Iberian and Romance languages) and Eastern Europe (Slavic and Hungarian languages) - always in combination with German, English and French and a small solution in the main business languages with German, English and French.

Download the dictionary in 22 languages

RailLexic is a terminology database of 22 languages: 
Arabic / Danish / German / English / Esperanto / Farsi / Farsi / Finnish / French / Italian / Japanese / Dutch / Norwegian / Polish / Portuguese / Russian / Romanian / Swedish / Serbian / Slovak / Spanish / Czech / Hungarian and with some 16,000 technical terms per language and many definitions.

Inside the RailLexic Dictionay

The database contains terms relating to the following railway topics, such as: Driving operation, bridge construction, building and civil engineering, rail, signalling, vehicles, administration, high-speed technology, abbreviations, freight and passenger traffic, all technical details of rolling and standing materials as well as specific mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, signalling, material technology, plastics technology, wire, steel and metal processing.

Each term is included in one of the 104 specialized topics, and is delivered with all sorts of term variants, definitions and terminology in the thesaurus. The Thesaurus' Railway Transport' is created and developed by UIC. A search function makes working with the database easier.

As a content manager, Acolada manages and maintains its vocabulary using the UniLex Pro browser, which is used for many other dictionaries. By the way, this vocabulary can be easily combined with other dictionaries on the computer, a real enrichment for any translator - especially of exotic languages. Three languages can be searched simultaneously.

The following links refer to our German-language shopping cart. The direct link to the downloads can be found here: