Every reader of Greek ends up with a favourite dictionary. Here are the ones you will hear about, what each is for, and where to find them.
The dictionaries
| Dictionary | What it is | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| LSJ: Liddell, Scott and Jones, A Greek–English Lexicon | The standard large dictionary, first published in 1843 by Oxford University Press; the ninth edition (1940) with a Revised Supplement (1996). Free online since 2007 through the Perseus Project | Looking up anything; its entries cite the passages where a word is used. This site's look-up uses it |
| The “Middle Liddell”: An Intermediate Greek–English Lexicon (1889) | A shorter LSJ that keeps the authors' names, for the literature most often read | Students |
| Autenrieth, A Homeric Dictionary | Georg Autenrieth's dictionary of Homer's words, in English (the edition of 1891 on Perseus and Logeion) | Reading Homer |
| The Cambridge Greek Lexicon (2021) | About 37,000 words from about 90 authors, Homer to the early second century AD, in present-day English; made first for students (editor-in-chief James Diggle). A review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review praises its translations and questions gaps in what it covers | Students of the classical authors |
| The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek (2015) | About 140,000 entries, from the eighth century BC to the sixth AD; the English edition of Franco Montanari's Italian dictionary | Later Greek and non-literary texts as well |
| BDAG: A Greek–English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (3rd edition, 2000) | The dictionary of the New Testament, revised by Frederick W. Danker (University of Chicago Press); its reviewer in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review called it “the best tool of its kind that exists in any language” | The New Testament and early Christian writers |
Each description rests on the publisher's page, a review or a reference page listed below.
Free, online, at once: Logeion, from the University of Chicago, searches several dictionaries together, among them LSJ, the Middle Liddell and Autenrieth. The look-up in this site's reader links to it, and to Perseus, under “More dictionaries”.
What this site uses: LSJ in the Perseus Digital Library's copy (CC BY-SA), short definitions of the commonest words from the Dickinson College Commentaries' Greek Core Vocabulary, and Wiktionary, fetched live.
Check yourself
Where this comes from
- Wikipedia, A Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ's editions, the Middle and Little Liddell, free since 2007)
- Perseus Digital Library, Georg Autenrieth, A Homeric Dictionary
- Cambridge University Press, “Cambridge Greek Lexicon is a milestone in the history of Classics”
- Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2022.02.39, review of The Cambridge Greek Lexicon
- Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2018.03.46, review of The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek
- Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2001.06.01, review of BDAG (3rd edition)
- Wikipedia, Logeion
- Dickinson College Commentaries, Greek Core Vocabulary