The Cambridge Greek Lexicon

First complete new Ancient Greek Lexicon for over 100 years. Set of two hardback volumes. The project took 23 years of work by a team from the faculty of classics at Cambridge led by editor-in-chief James Diggle, a professor with Queens’ College. And the attraction for those who love ancient Greek studies is the lexicon’s new definitions and translations rendered in contemporary English. If you’ve ever tried to study some of the older material on the subject, you’ll know that its English explanations required almost as much translation as the ancient Greek, making textbooks in the field some of the most frequently thrown volumes across university dorm rooms in many markets.

To create this new dictionary–Cambridge says it’s the first of its kind in nearly two centuries–the team re-read most of ancient Greek literature, from Homer forward into the second century AD.

Using digital databases, the scholars worked through the Greek alphabet’s 24 characters to make “a clear, modern, and accessible guide” to these very old words and their contextualized developments in the hands of various authors.

The project opened in 1997, spurred by scholar John Chadwick, whose own titles from Cambridge University Press include The Decipherment of Linear B and The Mycenaean World. And the initial plan, we’re told, was to revise the Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon by Liddel and Scott, which had first appeared in 1889. That’s the work that remains the most commonly used by English-language schools and universities–until now.