The Cambridge Greek Lexicon is an eye-opener for classical scholars

The great Latinist D.R. Shackleton Bailey was once said to have been pinned into a corner at a party and ordered to reveal what he actually did. ‘I just look things up all day,’ came the tetchy reply.

That will ring a loud bell with those who learned ancient Greek or Latin at school, especially when it came to looking up the meaning of a word in LSJ, Oxford’s big Greek-English dictionary, or rather lexicon (Greek lexikos, ‘of or for words’). It was named after the initials of its two original editors (Henry) Liddell and (Robert) Scott, and a later revising editor (Henry Stuart) Jones, and was so full of Greek that it took about a day to find the meaning you were actually looking for.

Leaning heavily on Franz Passow’s Greek-German dictionary, LSJ was published in 1843 at a price equivalent to £235. Following a tradition going back to Henri Estienne’s massive, ground-breaking Greek Thesaurus of 1572, its actual purpose was to give a historico-linguistic account of the Greek language.