Search TERMDAT for official designations of the Swiss Federal Administration.

Use this to look up the officially validated German/French/Italian/English name of an authority, department or legal act — for example to check how a body is named in another national language before citing it.

search_term is Lucene query syntax: * and ? wildcards and the ~ fuzzy operator work. Matching is on whole words, so a compound is not found by its parts — «Quellensteuer» does not match «Quellensteuerverordnung», but «Quellensteuer*» does. Reach for a wildcard before concluding a term is absent.

Leave detail at True unless you want a bare hit list. With detail=False the API omits languageDetails, and every entry comes back with an empty variants — id, url, status and classification, but not a single designation. That is a hit you cannot read a term from, from a tool whose purpose is terms. Use it to count or to filter by classification, never to answer «what is this called».

out_language adds a target language to every entry's variants — it is purely additive and never filters the result set. fields is a comma-separated subset of: Terminus, Name, Abbreviation, Phraseology, Definition, Note, Context, Source, Metadata, Country, Comment; empty means Terminus, Name, Abbreviation, Phraseology, Definition, Note, Source. By default the search spans all 23 subject classifications; pass classification_ids or collection_ids to narrow it (see list_classifications / list_collections).

Scope caveat: TERMDAT holds administrative nomenclature (authority names, titles of legal acts, abbreviations), not domain vocabulary — so a term may genuinely be absent. Establish that with a wildcard retry, not from a single empty result, and never fill the gap with a guessed designation.

Coverage caveat: the public API serves a subset of what termdat.bk.admin.ch shows, and the Federal Chancellery confirmed on 2026-08-21 that this is deliberate — the selection follows the needs of the federal administration's translators, and no fuller coverage is planned. Entries the website lists can be missing from the API entirely: not hidden by a filter, simply not served, so no query reaches them. So «not found here» means «not in the API», never «not in TERMDAT»: say which one you mean, and point at www.termdat.ch for the difference.

Fetch known TERMDAT entries by their numeric IDs, with full language variants.

Use this to re-retrieve an entry you already found via search_terms (its entry_id), e.g. to pull all four national-language designations at once.

Get the official equivalent of an administrative term in another national language.

Returns the preferred designation (sequence 1) plus accepted variants, per matching entry. Use this for authority names, department titles and titles of legal acts.

Matches only against designation fields, so a term merely mentioned in a definition is never reported as an equivalent. term accepts Lucene wildcards; on an empty result retry with term* before concluding there is no equivalent.

Check a list of terms against validated TERMDAT designations.

Intended for communication QA: verify that authority names, department titles and abbreviations in a draft match the officially validated form. Each term is reported as validated, found_unvalidated or not_found. Up to 25 terms per call; the lookups run concurrently.

List the ~140 TERMDAT collections, for use as collection_ids filters.

List the 23 subject classifications (e.g. BILD = education), for classification_ids.

Availability of the TERMDAT API. Never returns silently empty.