Liddell And Scott Greek Lexicon

Working with the Liddell And Scott Greek Lexicon in Practice

The Liddell And Scott Greek Lexicon is still the standard reference work for Classical Greek, despite being first published in 1843. I use it daily in my research, and it is not the friendly tool you might expect. It is dense, occasionally contradictory, and full of editorial shortcuts that trip up even experienced readers. The lexicon is organized around lemma headwords in alphabetical order. Each entry contains sub-definitions marked with Roman numerals, Greek usage citations in abbreviated form, and cross-references that frequently send you looping back to places you already were. The abbreviation system alone takes about two weeks to memorize if you learn it through trial and error, which is what most of us do. The first thing I tell people who pick up LSJ is that the "J" in LSJ stands for Jones, and the abbreviation LSJ refers specifically to the 1940 revised edition, not the original 1843 Liddell and Scott. The original Liddell-Scott had no "J." version and covered a significantly different range of sources. If you are reading a modern student edition, it is almost certainly the Jones revision. This matters because the Jones revision added substantial post-classical material and altered citation conventions that confuse people who compare it to earlier printings or to the Supplementum.

Here is a concrete example of why this distinction matters. I was working through a passage in Plato's Laws where a verb appears with an unusual augment. I looked it up in LSJ, found three sub-definitions, and spent twenty minutes trying to figure out which time-period each citation belonged to. The entry marked some references as " Ion." and others as simply listing a play by Euripides without dialectal annotation. The dialect information was not consistently applied across entries, and the cross-reference sent me to a completely different lemma where the actual usage was discussed. I ended up using the TLG (Thesaurus Linguae Graecae) corpus search to verify the distribution of that form across the author corpus instead. The TLG query took about three minutes and gave me unambiguous results. The most common mistake beginners make with L&SS is treating the Roman numeral sub-definitions as a hierarchy of meaning. They are not. The ordering is roughly chronological within each sense group, but there is no reliable principle. A definition marked with "III" is not necessarily more common or more fundamental than one marked "I." The numerals track the historical appearance of cited examples, not semantic priority. When I encounter a word with seven sub-definitions and need to know which meaning applies in a specific passage, I do not read them top to bottom. I scan the citation abbreviations first, match them to the author and genre I am reading, then work backward to the relevant sub-definition. This usually cuts down the lookup time from five or six minutes to under a minute per entry. The abbreviation system deserves a separate warning. LSJ uses a shorthand that assumes prior familiarity. " Trag." means tragedy but does not specify which playwright. " Att." covers a enormous range of authors and genres. " Epigr." refers to epigraphic evidence, which sometimes predates or postdates the classical period by centuries. I have seen students cite an epigram from the second century CE as if it were contemporary with Thucydides because LSJ did not make the dating obvious in the entry. Always check the date range of your source text before accepting a sub-definition as applicable.

The digital versions of the lexicon introduce their own problems. The Perseus Digital Library version has occasional OCR errors where Greek characters are misrendered, particularly in entries with dense diacritical marks. The Packard Humanities Institute version is more reliable but sometimes fails to parse compound words correctly, splitting compounds that LSJ treats as single lemmata or merging separate entries that happen to share a prefix. I recently spent an afternoon reconciling a discrepancy between the two digital versions on the entry for , which turns out to have slightly different sub-definition ordering in each. Neither version is wrong, but they reflect different editorial decisions about how to organize the evidence. Another thing nobody tells you about the Liddell And Scott Greek Lexicon is that it is fundamentally a lexicographical artifact of nineteenth-century scholarship. The source base is incomplete by modern standards. Papyrological discoveries since the 1890s have added thousands of attestations that are not represented in the main body of the lexicon. The Supplementum Liddell-Scottiano-Jonianum (1996) addresses some of this, but it is a separate volume and is not integrated into the main entry structure. If you are working with documentary Greek, inscriptions from the Hellenistic period, or any text that relies heavily on papyrological evidence, LSJ will leave gaps. You should have the LSAG (Liddell-Scott-Abrams-Gordon) supplement open alongside the main lexicon, or better yet, use the Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek, which incorporates the supplement and additional recent discoveries. The Brill Dictionary is the only complete replacement for LSJ in terms of coverage, but it is not free and its entry structure differs significantly from LSJ, which means your lookup habits will need adjustment. For most students and researchers, LSJ remains the primary tool because it is freely available in multiple digital formats and its abbreviation system, while opaque, is consistent enough that you learn to navigate it. The real cost is time. An average LSJ lookup for an unfamiliar word takes anywhere from two to ten minutes depending on the complexity of the entry and whether the digital version you are using has rendering issues. For comparison, a TLG search for the same word typically returns results in under a minute, though interpreting those results requires a different skill set.

If you are just starting out with ancient Greek, do not rely exclusively on LSJ. Use a pedagogical dictionary like the Oxford Beginner's Dictionary of Ancient Greek or the Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek alongside it. LSJ is designed for people who already know the language at an advanced level and need to resolve ambiguous readings. It is not a teaching tool. The entry structure assumes you can read the citation abbreviations without a reference guide, which most beginners cannot. There is also the question of which Greek period your work covers. LSJ is strongest for Attic Greek and Homer. It weakens considerably for Koine Greek, where the New Testament Lexicon by BDAG is the standard reference. I have encountered senior graduate students who tried to use LSJ for NT Greek and produced translations that were plainly wrong because LSJ's understanding of Koine usage is based on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scholarly assessments rather than modern papyrological evidence. If you are working in NT or early Christian Greek, BDAG is the appropriate tool, and LSJ is supplementary at best. The entry for is a good illustration of how LSJ handles ambiguity. It gives you roughly twelve major sub-definitions and another half-dozen specialized uses, ranging from "speech" to "calculation" to "relation" to "proportion." None of these are wrong. The problem is that LSJ does not rank them by frequency or by suitability for different authors. When you encounter in Xenophon, the relevant meaning might be buried under five sub-definitions that are more appropriate to philosophical or technical prose. I typically start with the citations in my target author, locate the sub-definition that matches, then verify against the gloss provided. This reverses the standard reading direction of the entry and saves considerable time.

One more practical note about the free digital editions. The Internet Archive hosts the full 1883 Liddell-Scott-Jones edition as a searchable PDF. The OCR quality varies, but the text is fully searchable and the page images are available for verification. The University of Chicago's Packard database is the other free option and has better search functionality but a less complete interface for browsing entries. I use both, depending on whether I need to verify a specific page reference or run a quick lemma search. The Liddell And Scott Greek Lexicon is indispensable despite its flaws. It is the only lexicon that every scholar of Classical Greek is expected to know how to use, and that expectation exists because there is genuinely nothing better available for most practical purposes. The alternatives either lack the depth of LSJ or lack the accessibility. My advice is to learn the abbreviation system thoroughly, understand the limitations of each digital version, and keep BDAG and the Brill Dictionary as backup tools rather than replacements.