Liddell and Scott Greek–English Lexicon (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

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.