An architecture for federating heterogeneousdictionary databases is described. It proposes acommon description language and query language toprovide for the exchange of information betweendatabases with different organizations, on differentplatforms and in different DBMSs. The common querylanguage has an SQL like structure. The first versionof the description language follows the TEI standardtag definitions for dictionaries with the expectationthat the description language will be expanded in thefuture. A practical implementation of the proposalsusing WWW technology for two multi-lingualdictionaries is described.