Logos 4.3 – Liddell and Scott Upgrade

The Logos Library has included Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon, Ninth Edition for many years.  L&S is the standard lexicon for Classical and Koine Greek.  It is a massive book (over 2000 larger-format pages with tiny print).  When the Perseus Collection was announced many people observed that the older L&S Lexicon was not included in the collection, likely since Logos sells the full lexicon as a Logos resource.

When I started Logos this morning I noticed that it downloaded an updated version of Liddell and Scott.  It has been upgraded to launch Perseus Collection resources if available.  For example, I selected at random the word ἡμιολιος, which means something like “half as large as.”  It does not appear in the NT so BDAG is not going to have an entry for this word.  If I float over the  Hdt.5.88 in the entry, Logos supplies me the text in a floating window in Herodotus Book 5, paragraph 88.  If I click on the entry, Herodotus launches to 5.88 in English. Several other resources are tagged in the same entry, Xenophon, Anabasis, Plato, Laws and Timaeus, Polybius, Histories,  Arrianus Historicus (Greek only), and a few others.  Diodorus Siculus Historicus is tagged in one case (19.65), but not in another (15.44).  This resource only appears in the Perseus collection in Greek, so Logos naturally goes to the Greek text.  Texts which are not in the Perseus collection are (obviously) not tagged.  Logos will identify the abbreviation for you, but there is no link.

The classical Greek resources in the  Perseus collection now launch Liddell and Scott if it is installed.  As I observed earlier, Greek lexicons are arranged in a pre-determined order.  If a word appears in Bauer, then BDAG/BAGD will launch when you double click on a word.  If it does not appear in Bauer, then Liddell and Scott will launch, or whatever other lexicons you have purchased and installed.  You can re-arrange this order to suit your needs.

Unfortunately, references to papyri are not tagged even if they appear in the Duke Papyri collection. For example, in the entry for ᾰ̓δελφοσύνη, “fraternal,” is a referent to CPR 5.23.5.  CPR refers to the Corpus Papyrorum Raineri, which is part of the Duke Collection.  This is a 23 volume set, although not all the volumes are included in the Logos resources since they are not included in the Perseus collection.  I was able to open CPR, find volume 5, document 23, and line 10 quickly, although Liddell and Scott is not tagged  to launch this resource automatically.  Even without tagging, I cannot stress enough how valuable the Duke Collection is for exegesis.  There is no way I could have checked this resources locally.  The closest University withholding this series is and hour and a half away and has the books on microfiche only.  Individual volumes go for $150 or more on Amazon if they are available at all.  Even though a few volumes are available through Google Books, they are not particularly usable since they are PDF images rather than searchable texts.

The bad news is that the full Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon is expensive.  (But then so is the paper copy!) Logos also sells the Intermediate Liddell and Scott (seventh edition), sometimes known as “Middle Liddell” since there is an even smaller glossary drawn from the larger L&S (“Little Liddell”).  For the most part, the references in the Intermediate L&S are not to specific texts but only to authors (Herodotus, Plato).  The Intermediate lexicon is a part of the Original Languages bundle, unfortunately the full Liddell and Scott is not included in any bundle.

One thought on “Logos 4.3 – Liddell and Scott Upgrade

Leave a Reply