Thirteen men at one table – that is how work on the great Latvian-language dictionary resumed on 13 October 1922. At Jānis Endzelīns’s invitation, Āronu Matīss, Apsīšu Jēkabs, Pēteris Šmits and other helpers gathered in the Linguistics Section of the Knowledge Commission of the Riga Latvian Society. They took up Kārlis Mīlenbahs’s unfinished legacy – 66 notebooks with about 15,000 pages – and on the very first evening turned to words beginning with “a”.

This meeting marked the beginning of the systematic completion of “K. Mīlenbahs’s Latvian Language Dictionary” under Endzelīns’s direction. From 1923 to 1932, the Linguistics Section devoted 309 meetings to the dictionary – not merely as an academic task, but as a broad act of caring for the Latvian language in the new state.