The WHO Drug Dictionary is an international classification of medicines created by the WHO Programme for International Drug Monitoring and managed by the Uppsala Monitoring Centre

Uppsala Monitoring Centre

The Uppsala Monitoring Centre , located in Uppsala, Sweden, is the field name for the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for International Drug Monitoring...

.

It is used by pharmaceutical companies, clinical trial

Clinical trial

Clinical trials are a set of procedures in medical research and drug development that are conducted to allow safety and efficacy data to be collected for health interventions...

 organizations and drug regulatory authorities for identifying drug names in spontaneous ADR reporting (and pharmacovigilance

Pharmacovigilance

Pharmacovigilance is the pharmacological science relating to the detection, assessment, understanding and prevention of adverse effects, particularly long term and short term side effects of medicines...

) and in clinical trials. Created in 1968 and regularly updated, since 2005 there have been major developments in the form of a WHO Drug Dictionary Enhanced (with considerably more fields

Field (computer science)

In computer science, data that has several parts can be divided into fields. Relational databases arrange data as sets of database records, also called rows. Each record consists of several fields; the fields of all records form the columns....

 and data entries) and a WHO Herbal Dictionary, which covers traditional and herbal

Herbalism

Herbalism is a traditional medicinal or folk medicine practice based on the use of plants and plant extracts. Herbalism is also known as botanical medicine, medical herbalism, herbal medicine, herbology, herblore, and phytotherapy...

medicines.

Dictionary Versions

The Dictionary is updated and released four times per year, 1st of March, 1st of June, 1st of September and 1st of December. The Herbal dictionary is released twice per year, 1st of March and 1st of September.
This is an on-going list of the versions of the dictionary, with their names and release dates.

Version	Release Date
WHODD Version 99.2	March 1998
WHODD 2003 (June)	1st June 2003
WHODD 1st June 2006	1st June 2006
WHODD 1st June 2007	1st June 2007
WHODD 1st June 2008	1st June 2008
WHODD 1st June 2009	1st June 2009

The WHO Drug Dictionary has previously been abbreviated as 'WHODRL' and may still be referenced as such.