The TDK’s central committee distributed to army officers, government officials, schoolteachers and doctors throughout the country a booklet explaining how to go about collecting typical regional words, along with slips of paper to write them down on. Within a year, more than 35,000 different items were collected. Moreover, nearly 90,000 other words were found in old texts and dictionaries of closely related languages such as Azeri and Turkmen. After a rather cursory inspection, these two collections were merged, along with some minor sources, into a work known as Tarama Dergisi. This was intended as a source for experts to draw on when proposing new vocabulary. But enthusiastic purists took it as a reference work and ran with it.