My impressions have been mixed. The dictionary itself is fantastic, the finest Greek-English dictionary in the world and a triumph of scholarship. The problems I found were:
- *Its enormous size and weight. This is a difficult dictionary to use because it is so enormous.
* The printing. The text has been offset numerous times, which leads the letters to look thin and insubstantial. It's still entirely readable, but makes one eyes ache after heavy use. I'd recommend using it with a magnifying glass.
* The cost. I paid 273 euro for it, having stupidly not investigated beforehand the possibility of ordering it from the United States, where it would have cost about a hundred dollars less. Still, even that price puts it beyond the reach of many university students, who often need food more than a fancy dictionary.
Because my Pocket Oxford dictionary has nearly every word in my current object of study (Xenophon's Anabasis), I haven't used the dictionary so much. However, the lexicon has proved absolutely indispensible for those tricky words which are either not included in smaller dictionaries, or insufficiently explicated. Lidell & Scott has an example sentence for most words, so one can see the word used in another context which can be very helpful.
If you are going onto graduate study in classics, you need this dictionary. There's no doubt about that. But there's no rush if you are a freshman or sophomore. It's nice to have, but don't be so impressed by the book's perennial status within the field and assume you have to buy it right this second.
