Best Online Dictionary for Ancient Greek?

Greek Learning Greek
1

I am looking for an online dictionary for Ancient Greek. I am mostly interested in Koine, but info on Attic would also be useful.

Ideally, I was hoping there might be something similar to Whitakers Words (http://www.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/words.exe) But for Greek, is there anything as good as that? If not, what is the closest thing?

2

The Liddell and Scott dictionary at the Perseus project is the one I use: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/resolveform?redirect=true

3

Thanks for that. It seems I can only look up Greek>English words and not English>Greek words.
Is there any other site that does both?

Also i can’t seem to work out how to input Greek letters on that page. If I copy and paste from other websites, the Greek letters just come out as strange symbols.

4

Diogenes (http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin/Software/Diogenes/index.php) uses the Perseus data but can be installed locally or on the internet as a server. It works much more quickly and handles different types of input (unicode, etc.) easily and well. It has the same limitation, though, in only being a greek->english tool.

5

For English to Greek I use the Woodhouse dictionary here: http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/Woodhouse/

6

Go to the University of Chicago LSJ lexicon. It has a search page which lets you search in either Greek or English, and find words starting with a specific pattern, ending in a specific pattern, ktl. You can also click on the link in the returned entry for any word which is titled A Greek-English Lexicon; Machine readable text…It will bring you to an alphabetical word list.

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/Reference/LSJ.html

This is the most useful online Dictionary. Although it does not provide parsing information like the Perseus.Tufts.edu LSJ lexicon does. Also, sometimes the Middle LSJ has a listing for a word that is buried somewhere in a massive LSJ (the big one) lexicon. So the Middle LSJ and the Big LSJ are two different creatures – and both can help you at times.

A side note: TLG put its own version of LSJ online. After several days, they have taken it down because of hackers trying to penetrate the site. This was a very cool implementation of the LSJ lexicon. At this time it still seems to be offline.

http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsjinfo/about.php

Louis Sorenson

7

Hi Everybody,

For English to Koine, check out Vine’s expository dictionary of the new testament:

http://www.antioch.com.sg/cgi-bin/bible/vines/greek.pl

Ken Walsh

8

Here is another version of Liddell, Scott, Jones Ancient Greek Lexicon which is much easier to search than Perseus. You can enter in the search box Greek characters without diacritics or Latin characters, and you will get a list of all matching entries.

9

I’m bumping this very old thread, as it turns out to be one of Textkits most referred topics from search. I imagine that it could use some updated recommendations.

10

English-Attic / English-Ancient Greek CRITICAL dictionary (Yonge 1849)
English-Attic / English-Ancient Greek copious PHRASEOLOGICAL dictionary (Fradersdorff 1849)

11

Don’t know if it’s the best, but it includes several lexicons and dictionaries, including LSJ and Autenreith:

http://logeion.uchicago.edu/lexidium

There is an app for the iPhone as well.

12

TonyLoco23 originally asked if there was something similar to Whitaker’s Words. There was and is. It’s a simple program for the PC called Unicorn and can be found at The Latin and Greek Study Groups site: http://quasillum.com/software/unicorn.php.

You open or enter your text, click on a particular word, and Unicorn finds, translates and parses the word - just like Whitaker.

It works for both Latin and Greek. The default is Latin (it actually uses the Whitaker definitions).

To switch between Latin and Greek you press ctrl-G.

For entering Greek letters the program uses its own set of keyboard mappings but they’re intuitive and easy to learn, eg in the Greek mode if you type a)/nqrwpon or a/)nqrwpon you get ἄνθρωπον (typing any diacritics AFTER their letter).

I found it very useful some years ago when I was one of a group working our way through Crosby and Schaeffer’s ‘Introduction to Greek’.

One tip: when you set your preferences, leave ‘TERSE’ unchecked if you want the parsings.

Oh yes, it also does Hebrew.

Int

13

For those who require more detailed searches than conveniently available through any online dictionary, the full text of Henri Estienne’s “Thesaurus Graecae Linguae” lexicon from the 19th century can now be freely downloaded. The material is available to search at leisure using one’s own software. It is a near perfect digitization in UTF-8 format, available as PDF but also in text-only format. (Importantly, all 19th century commentary is set off from the 16th century original text by square brackets.)

Note: this material is a near perfect digitization (approx. 99%) with most errors having to do with numbers. It is given as a PDF for easy correction. To be sure, it is an old-school reference in that the Greek is given in terms of Latin only, but nevertheless it is a primary source for any modern lexicon including those online.

Two multi-volume editions are freely available, one edited by C. Hasse and the Dindorf brothers (published 1830-1865 by Didot of Paris) and the other issued as a subscription series distributed in England (1816-1823) and edited by A. J. Valpy.

Both are found at the Internet archive https://archive.org/details/@almound. In addition, full text editions are freely available of the Thesaurus linguae Latinae of Robert Estienne (1740 edition) and of John Edwin Sandys’ A History of Classical Scholarship (1903).

Al