Puhvel was President of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies from 1971 to 1972. He is a member of many other scholarly organizations, including the Linguistic Society of America, the American Oriental Society and the American Philological Association. Puhvel has been a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (1961–1962), and a Guggenheim Fellow (1968–1969). He became an Officer First Class of the Order of the White Rose of Finland in 1967. Puhvel is the creator of the Hittite Etymological Dictionary (1984–), which as of 2020 has been published in ten volumes. This project is the culmination of more than a half a century of work by Puhvel. Since volume 5 (2001), it complements the Chicago Hittite Dictionary, which began in 1980.
