Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Deutsches Worterbuch (DWB) comprises the most extensive documentation of the German language: for more than one hundred years - the longest period of publication for a German dictionary - generations of lexicographers have contributed about 350,000 entries to the DWB, which is divided into sixteen large volumes (thirty-two sections), containing a total of 67,744 columns. The DWB also reflects more than one hundred years of institutional, lexicographical, historical, and political history. This paper describes the project 'Deutsches Worterbuch on CD-ROM and on the Internet', established at the University of Trier in 1998, stressing in particular the significance of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and the guidelines developed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for the creation of a digitized version of the DWB. In addition, a prototype for a CD-ROM version will be introduced, emphasizing the importance of the electronic DWB, via its transformation into the electronic medium, for opening up new possibilities in using the rich dictionary material.