Liddell and Scott Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ)

von Henry George Liddell; Henry Stuart Jones; Robert Scott; Roderick McKenzie

Verlag:

Clarendon Press

, 1996

Overview

The Liddell and Scott Greek–English Lexicon (9th edition, 1940), is the central reference work for all scholars of ancient Greek authors and texts discovered up to 1940, from the 11th century BC to the Byzantine Period. The early Greek of authors such as Homer and Hesiod, Classical Greek, and the Greek Old and New Testaments are included. Each entry lists not only the definition of a word, but also its irregular inflections, and quotations from a full range of authors and sources to demonstrate usage.

Indispensable for classical and biblical studies alike, the world's most comprehensive and authoritative dictionary of ancient Greek is now available with the Revised Supplement integrated into the body of the text for the first time ever. The publication of the Revised Supplement in 1996 marked a major event in classical scholarship and was the culmination of 13 years' painstaking work overseen by a committee appointed by the British Academy, involving the cooperation of many experts from around the world.

The Logos edition is the most useful version of Liddell and Scott (LSJ) ever assembled. It is the only edition in which the hundreds of pages and 26,000+ articles of 'Supplement' material have been integrated into the text of the main lexicon, allowing the user to instantly access the 1996 revisions and additions without flipping pages. And like all Logos reference works, the electronic edition links to all the other reference books in Logos Bible Software for instant lookup of related texts. This includes over 198,000 links to the Perseus Classics Collection!

Key Features

• Integration of the revised (1996) supplement in the main body text
• Formatting enhancements that make the text more readable
• Inclusion of various fields for searching enhancement

Contents

Top Highlights

“):—trust, put faith in, rely on a person, thing, or statement” (Page 1407)

“:—will, wish, be willing, Hom., etc.; usu. implying choice or preference (cf. iv) opp. ἐθέλω ‘consent’, εἰ” (Page 325)

“say or do something agreeable to a person, show him favour or kindness, oblige, gratify” (Page 1978)

“μέν used absolutely to express certainty, not followed by correlative δέ, indeed, of a truth, synonymous with μήν” (Page 1101)

“proclaim as conqueror, Plu.2.185a; Φαβωρῖνον ἡ εὐγλωττία ἐν σοφισταῖς ἐκήρυττεν Philostr.VS1.8.1:—Pass” (Page 949)

Praise for the Print Edition

the digital LSJ is a real gain and a must for classicists. (more...)

—Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Willeon Slenders, Radboud University Nijmegen

All in all, it is a pretty slick way to access that magnificent reference work. (more...)

—Classical Review, Rob Latousek (Centaur Systems), Random Access columnist

In the electronic Liddell and Scott, the Revised Supplement is seamlessly woven into the dictionary's lemmata and is available nowhere else electronically. The presentation of the dictionary's entries in the electronic Liddell and Scott is much easier to read, with generous white space separating subsections that in the print Liddell and Scott cause blurred vision even in the youngest. In addition, while not correcting all of the erroneously or confusedly labeled sections and subsections of a lemma's definition...the electronic edition's layout makes it easy to see an ordered and logical presentation of the definition. (more...)

—Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Gerald Verbrugghe, Rutgers University, Camden

Benefits of the Logos Bible Software Edition of LSJ

Supplement Integration

Oxford University Press achieved a monumental task in lexicography with its comprehensive update and 1996 release of the supplement to the ninth edition of LSJ. Out of the more than 125,000 articles of LSJ, the supplement specifies over 25,000 updates—one out of every five articles.

In preparing an electronic edition of LSJ, the next natural step was taken: full integration of the supplement content into the main body text of LSJ. Lexicon users no longer need to examine two different locations in the lexicon when studying a word that is included in the supplement. The content has been seamlessly integrated.

Articles that have been updated in accordance with supplement guidelines are denoted by the presence of a circled star

preceding the article headword. This is reminiscent of the print edition’s symbol denoting updated articles and as such should be familiar to users of the printed text.

Formatting Enhancements

The text of the print edition of LSJ is typographically dense. The font size is small, and definition senses are listed consecutively with no vertical breaks. These are all justifiable formatting decisions for a print edition of a lexicon such as LSJ as they reduce production cost through keeping page count down, allowing more information to be packed into the lexicon.

In an electronic edition, however, the text can have “room to breathe.” Rather than fully emulate the printed two-column format, decisions were made early on to use vertical and horizontal white space to make the articles themselves more readable. Indentation, therefore, shows the overall structure of an article. The outline-style formatting of many of the articles is now visible and helpful in determining the scope of a given word. This has the additional benefit of making the text easier to skim when searching for a particular sense of a word.

The print edition of LSJ also conserves space in its grouping of article headwords by prefix where words with similar prefixes are able to be logically grouped. The front matter states, “The Hyphen has for the most part been used without regard to etymology, to represent that group of letters which is common to two or more consecutive words.” The print edition, therefore, contains dashes in headwords to denote the prefix for a given group, then sub-entries within the group are suffixes that assume the previous prefix.

This as well has been enhanced in this electronic edition. Each article begins a new line, and each headword is complete, with prefix and suffix joined forming one word. This, of course, makes it easier to locate a given headword in the text.

Search Enhancements

The print edition of LSJ employs some typographical practices that allow certain assumptions to be made in the electronic edition.

• Italicized text, with the exception of abbreviations, indicates a definition gloss. In several instances, particular instances of words in classical literature are cited and glossed. Therefore all italic text has been indexed within a gloss field. This field is searchable, so one may locate instances of a given word (e.g., boat) when it is supplied as a gloss.
• Text within [square brackets] indicates a prosodial remark. Therefore all text within square brackets has been indexed within a prosody field.
• Text within (parentheses) indicates an etymological remark. Therefore all text within parentheses has been indexed within an etymology field.
• Greek headwords have been indexed within the lemma field. Other Greek words appearing in bold text have been included as article-level topics.

Several skilled hands and minds have been associated with the preparation, improvement, development, and publication of this great lexicon over the past 160 years. It is a privilege to now be associated with this highly respected body of work.