Is it possible to construct a vocabulary list which excludes the most common words (e.g. those on the Dickinson College Core Vocabulary list)?
Perseus doesn’t seem to allow this.
Yes, you can easily do it. I make vocabulary lists using Excel. I have the words in Excel. In another Excel file, easy.xls, I have the words I know. Using the VLOOKUP function, I check if those words are in the easy.xls file. I delete the ones that are there, and that’s it. Only the words I don’t know remain.
Yes, that’s pretty good, but the problem is that it’s ordered by the occurrence of words in that particular book. If an author uses an unusual word a lot, you’ll lose it. Conversely, a lot of frequent words, if he uses them just a few times, you’re stuck with them again.
Here’s a better tool, in my opinion:
https://vocab.perseus.org/word-list/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0032.tlg006.perseus-grc2/?o=-3&page=all
- You can sort words by occurrence both in the book and by occurrence in the entire Greek corpus. And I would use this sorting by occurrence in the whole corpus to remove the most frequent words.
- There are also short definitions in English for the words.
what author are you looking for?
Plato