Cambridge Greek Lexicon
The Cambridge Greek Lexicon is a dictionary of the Ancient Greek language published by Cambridge University Press in April 2021. First conceived in 1997 by the classicist John Chadwick, the lexicon was compiled by a team of researchers based in the Faculty of Classics in Cambridge consisting of the Hellenist James Diggle, Bruce Fraser, Patrick James, Oliver Simkin, Anne Thompson, and Simon Westripp. Abandoning the predominant historico-linguistic method, it begins each entry with the word's root meaning and proceeds to list further common usages. The dictionary is also notable for avoiding euphemism.
Development
During the 20th century, the leading dictionary of Ancient Greek in the English-speaking world was A Greek–English Lexicon, commonly known as LSJ after the initials of its authors. Published in 1843 by Oxford University Press, the LSJ was a dictionary of broad scope and aimed to provide a historico-linguistic account of the Greek language. Its entries contained many untranslated Greek quotations to illustrate individual usages of words while English approximations were used sparingly.In 1997, the classical scholar John Chadwick conceived of a plan to update the LSJ, which had become antiquated but was still widely used. Although he had originally planned to improve the existing dictionary, Chadwick and the project's advisory committee soon realised the LSJ was too antiquated in its design and that they would have to start afresh. A team led by the Cambridge Hellenist James Diggle began to read most Greek literature from the Homeric epics until the second century AD. The project was intended to take up to five years but was concluded after twenty-three years. The resulting dictionary was published as the Cambridge Greek Lexicon on 22 April 2021 by Cambridge University Press.