The availability of linguistic databases for a variety of languages and a variety of linguistic levels is enabling for a number of areas of research. Within writing system and literacy research, databases of orthographic information per se as well as a variety of forms of phonological information at least, and potentially morphological, syntactic and semantic information may all be useful. The papers within this special issue address a range of databases for different languages and with a range of different types of information. They talk about both the development and uses of such databases.