The story
Origins
In 2001, Michael Walther, Bjarni Norddahl, Thomas Thomsen, and Jacob Hatt founded the company Cool Systems ApS. Their associated website, coolsms.dk became one of the biggest websites in Denmark at that point in time, with 266,000 visits a day. The website allowed people to send text messages online at a lower price than the telephone companies’ usual price. Shortly after the release of coolsms.dk, Thomas Thomsen and Jacob Hatt left the company. In 2003, the remaining founders, Michael Walther and Bjarni Norddahl, went on to change Cool Systems ApS to Ordbogen ApS, and later, converted to a public limited liability company - Ordbogen A/S. 2003 was also the year when Ordbogen A/S released Ordbogen.com - the first subscription-based dictionary website in Denmark, offering easy access to a high-quality Danish-English/English-Danish dictionary, edited by Jørgen Rohde, translator and editor.
By 2005, the company replaced the previous dictionary with a new version tailored for web use, which was the company's first self-produced dictionary. That same year, Ordbogen also became strategic partners with the Centre for Lexicography at Aarhus University in order to publish their dictionary Den Danske Netordbog (Engl.: “the Danish Internet Dictionary”).
A year later, in 2006, Ordbogen A/S released their second bilingual and self-produced dictionary, Danish-German/German-Danish.
2008-2013
During this period, Ordbogen received the Børsen Gazelle award six years in a row. In 2010, Ordbogen acquired the online grammar teaching system Grammatip, and that same year they entered into another strategic partnership with the publishers JP/Politikens Hus, followed by the Danish Language Council, Dansk Sprognævn, in 2011.
In 2012, Grammatip was merged with Ordbogen A/S. This was also the year that the online school platform Educas was launched. Educas had developed from Vikartimen, a teachers’ resource previously bought by Ordbogen A/S, whose name and concept were changed and further digitised.
2012 was also the year that Ordbogen became strategic partners with Oxford Dictionaries as well as German publishers Duden Schulbuch and Cornelsen Verlag, while 2013 was the year work started on Lemma.com.
2013-present
In recent years, Ordbogen.com has undergone significant development, and in 2016 many new additions to the staff were made. Ordbogen is currently in the process of expanding to international markets through their development of an international version of Ordbogen.com, the site Lemma.com.
From Wikipedia’s article on Ordbogen.com, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4