Abstract From Keel to Truck is a vast trilingual (English, French, German) dictionary that was highly successful in the late 19th century. To complete the work, author Heinrich Paasch builds on a long tradition of marine dictionaries and develops an original terminographical method which would foreshadow 20th-century theory for the discipline of terminology. His highly structured book prefigures terminological knowledge bases: a monosemic approach, reliance on semantic relationships, and close attention to divergences between languages.