This dataset represents a dictionary specifically designed for textual applications in economics. The dictionary has been constructed with two important characteristics: 1) to have a wide coverage of terms typically used in documents discussing economic and financial concepts, and 2) to provide a human-annotated sentiment score in the range [-1,1]. The sentiment score is a useful feature when the interest is to weight words by their sentiment content as opposed to categorizing terms in positive and negative. The dictionary can be used, for example, to construct measures of economic pessimism capturing the business cycle and correlating with measures of economic and financial uncertainty.