I do not own a Greek dictionary. Mostly, I have relied on the internet LSJ and glossaries provided in texts and my textbook. So, what to buy? There is a1929 abridged LSJ for 6.5pounds in good condition. I don’t think I should pass that up. But still, that is too big to take down to the cafe. Is there a good pocket dictionary? The Oxford only has 20000 entries and gets trashed in reviews. Anybody know of any other possibility to English? How about a good pocket dictionary in French or Italian? Anybody know of one? I have Lagensheidt French/English pocket dictionary that is so awesome; their Italian/English is so much weaker. Why can’t they just do one like their French/English for every language. 
I have the Lagensheidt pocket Classical Greek which I like very much. It has most words you would need. But you can’t beat the Middle Liddel, in my opinion. If all my books burnt down, that would be one of the first ones I would replace.
-
Why the Middle Liddell if it is just for home use? Wouldn’t the complete LS be better?
-
What is the difference between the Middle Liddell and the abridged?
-
They say that the words are in a different alphabetical order in the Lagensheidt in the amazon reviews. That turned me off immediately. Can you explain what the order is?
I too have the Langenscheidt as my little dictionary. It’s perfect as a portable dictionary, as it really is a pocket book in its size, is surprisingly well-bound, and has a cover made of I-don’t-know-what, but some sort of flexible plastic, so that it doesn’t wear and crease as a paperback does (but does look a mighty odd figure on your shelf). And its alphabetisation is perfectly regular, so I’m not not sure what that reviewer at amazon was talking about.
The dimensions of Oxford’s pocket dictionaries were determined in the age of heroes, and you’d have better luck fitting your trousers into their dictionary than the other way around. It includes an English-Greek section which the Langensheidt does not, and the Greek-English section is in fact a revised version of the Langenscheidt. And quite a reasonable revision it is, too, mostly a light-handed updating of Feyerabend’s century-old English. ἀαγής is no longer defined as “infrangible”, but as “not to be broken, strong”; ἁβροδίαιτος not as “weakling, voluptuary”, but as “living delicately”. It’s also more accommodating of us modern ignoramuses than the Langenscheidt in other ways. It gives you the principle parts for all adjectives, for instance, where the Langenscheidt is willing only to disclose how many principal parts each has. It also gives the genitive for each noun, assuming its readers are less knowledgable than Feyerabend did his.
The Langenscheidt’s your man for the pocket, in the senses of its being small in price and volume. The Oxford’s your man for its somewhat friendlier, and perhaps more accurate, definitions, and might be worth buying if you have any use for an English-Greek dictionary, though it will fall apart long before the Langenscheidt ever will.
Neither can be fairly compared to even the little Liddell.
More to be trusted than mine is Anne Mahoney’s review of Oxford’s pocket dictionary for the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, though I see she’s copied some of my observations without listing me as a reference:
If you’re a happy owner of iPhone, you should definitely get Lexiphanes. 3 euros in the App Store. Lexiphanes is basically LSJ + Autenrieth’s Homeric Dictionnary, which after installing you can access on your iPhone without being online. That’s what I call a pocket dictionnary. (I guess it works with iPad and iPod touch too)
Actually, it’s so practical that I usually use it even at home, though I have paper copies of both LSJ and Autenrieth.
Unfortunately, in just a few instances some characters have been misinterpreted when doing the scanning into machine-readable form, so very occasionnally I still have to check up a word in the paper dictionnary or online. (Strangely, Perseus’s LSJ doesn’t seem to have the same problems, though it seems to me that Lexiphanes’s LSJ is derived from Perseus)