Liddell and Scott: The History,

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World's Leading Lexicon of Ancient
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LIDDELL AND SCOTT
Frontispiece. Liddell and Scott’s Greek English Lexicon, first edition (1843), page 1.
Liddell and Scott
The History, Methodology, and
Languages of the World’s Leading
Lexicon of Ancient Greek

E 
CHRISTOPHER STRAY,
M I C H A E L C L A R K E , A N D JO S H U A T . K A T Z

1
 3
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Frontispiece. Liddell and Scott’s Greek English Lexicon, first edition (1843), page 1.
 List of Figures

Frontispiece. Liddell and Scott’s Greek English Lexicon, first edition

(1843), page 1. ii
1.1. The monstrous letter Π, depicted by Henry Liddell in his letter
to Robert Scott of July 1842 (Thompson 1899, 75). 12
12.1. Beginning of the entry for ἄρσην ‘male’, LSJ. 204
12.2. Beginning of the entry for νᾱός ‘temple’, LSJ. 205
12.3. Beginning of the entry for ἀνδρεῖος ‘of or for a man’, LSJ. 206
12.4. Entry for Περσεφόνη ‘Persephone’, LSJ. 206
12.5. Beginning of the entry for σωφροσύνη ‘soundness of mind’, LSJ. 207
12.6. Beginning of the entry for Ῥέα ‘Rhea’, LSJ. 207
12.7. Entry for ψάμμη ‘sand’, LSJ. 207
12.8. Beginning of the entry for ψάμμος ‘sand’, LSJ. 207
12.9. Beginning of the entry for ἕννυμι ‘put clothes on (another)’, LSJ. 208
12.10. Entry for ποτιμάστιος ‘at the breast’, LSJ. 208
12.11. Entry for συστᾰθεύω ‘help to roast’, LSJ. 208
12.12. Entry for ἄεθλος, ‘contest’, Passow 1830. 215
12.13. Entry for εὐφροσύνη ‘mirth’, Passow 1830. 215
12.14. Entry for ἐχθάνομαι, ‘incur hatred’, Passow 1830. 216
12.15. Entry for ἐπιλοιβή, ‘drink offering’, Passow 1830. 216
12.16. End of the entry for ἐϋκτίμενος, Passow 1830. 221
12.17. End of the entry for προτιόσσομαι, Passow 1830. 221
12.18. Eton Greek Grammar (1819, 218). 223
14.1. Chadwick’s account of μένος in Lexicographica Graeca. 253
14.2. μένος plotted according to its (hypothetical) diachronic development. 255
14.3. A possible prototype based account of ἄλσος. 259
16.1. Watkins’ schema for moveable property in Early Greek. 291
 List of Tables

1.1. Editions of the Lexicon. 13

12.1. Forms labelled ‘common’ in LS. 213
12.2. Instances of the label ‘gewöhnlich’ used in Passow 1830, Vol. 1 to
distinguish a form from one or more dialectal variants, where LS
does not label the same form ‘common’. 217
12.3. Instances of the label ‘gewöhnlich’ used in Passow 1830, Vol. 1 to
distinguish a form from one or more variants, where the variation
has nothing to do with dialects and LS does not label the same
form ‘common’. 218
12.4. Instances of the label ‘gemein’ used in Passow 1830 to distinguish
a form from one or more variants. 220
 List of Abbreviations

BDAG Danker, F.W. (2000) A Greek English Lexicon of the New

Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (BDAG). Based on
W. Bauer’s Griechisch deutsches Wörterbuch zu den Schriften des
Neuen Testaments und der frühchristlichen Literatur, Sixth edition,
ed. K. Aland and B. Aland with V. Reichmann, and on Previous
English Editions by W.F. Arndt, F.W. Gingrich, and F.W. Danker
(Chicago).
CGL J. Diggle et al. (2019) Cambridge Greek Lexicon (Cambridge).
DELG P. Chantraine (1968 80) Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue
grecque (Paris).
DELG Suppl. P. Chantraine et al. (2009) Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue
grecque (Paris).
DGE F.R. Adrados (ed.) (1980 ), Diccionario griego español (Madrid).
GE F. Montanari (1995) Vocabolario della lingua greca (Turin).
GI F. Montanari (2015) The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek (Leiden).
IGL H.G. Liddell (1889) An Intermediate Greek English Lexicon
(Oxford).
LS1–8 H.G. Liddell and R. Scott (1843; 8th edn 1897), A Greek English
Lexicon (Oxford).
LfgrE Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos (1955 2010) (Göttingen).
LSJ H.S. Jones and R. McKenzie (1940) A Greek English Lexicon
Compiled by H.G. Liddell and R. Scott. A New Edition, Revised and
Augmented Throughout (Oxford).
LSJ Suppl. H.G. Liddell, R. Scott, H. S. Jones, and R. McKenzie (1940), Greek
English Lexicon: A Supplement, ed. E.A. Barber with the assistance
of P. Maas, M. Scheller, and M.L. West.
LSJ Revd Suppl. H.G. Liddell, R. Scott, H. S. Jones, and R. McKenzie (1996), Greek
English Lexicon: Revised Supplement, ed. P.G.W. Glare, with
A.A. Thompson (Oxford).
OED J. Simpson and E. Weiner, (eds) (1989; CD ROM 1992, online
2000), Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn (Oxford).
OLD P.G.W. Glare, (ed.) (1982), Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford).
Passow¹ F. Passow (1819 24), Handwörterbuch der griechischen Sprache,
1st edn. (Leipzig).
Passow⁴ F. Passow (1831), Handwörterbuch der griechischen Sprache 4th edn
(Lepizig).
SEG Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum (1923 ) (Amsterdam).
TLG Thesaurus Linguae Graecae.
TLL Thesaurus Linguae Latinae.
 List of Contributors

Evelien Bracke is Language Lector in Greek Literature at Ghent University,

Belgium.
David Butterfield is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge
and Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at Queens’ College,
Cambridge, UK.
James Clackson is Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of
Cambridge and Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at Jesus College,
Cambridge, UK.
Michael Clarke is Professor of Classics at the National University of Ireland,
Galway, Ireland.
Amy Coker is an Honorary Research Fellow, Dept of Classics & Ancient
History, University of Bristol and Teacher of Classics at Cheltenham Ladies’
College.
John Considine is Professor of English at the University of Alberta, Canada.
Elizabeth Craik is Honorary Professor of Classics at the University of
St Andrews, UK.
David Goldstein is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Indo-European
Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA.
Patrick James was a Research Associate in the Faculty of Classics at the
University of Cambridge, UK, and served as an Assistant Editor for the
Cambridge Greek Lexicon Project. He now teaches Greek, Latin, and Classical
Civilisation at Haileybury in Hertfordshire.
Mark Janse is BOF-ZAP Research Professor in Ancient and Asia Minor Greek
at Ghent University, Belgium.
Joshua T. Katz is Cotsen Professor in the Humanities and Professor of
Classics at Princeton University, USA.
Tom Mackenzie is a Leventis Research Fellow in the Department of Greek and
Latin at University College London, UK.
Michael Meier-Brügger is Professor of Comparative and Indo-European
Linguistics at the Free University of Berlin, Germany.
Philomen Probert is Professor of Classical Philology and Linguistics at the
University of Oxford, UK.
xvi List of Contributors

Christopher Rowe is Emeritus Professor of Greek at Durham University, and

Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow.
Michael Silk is Emeritus Professor of Classical and Comparative Literature at
King’s College London, UK.
Christopher Stray is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of
Classics, Ancient History, and Egyptology at Swansea University, UK.
Anne Thompson was Assistant Editor for the Revised Supplement to Liddell
and Scott, and the first Editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Greek Lexicon.
Brent Vine is Distinguished Professor of Classics and A. Richard Diebold,
Jr. Professor of Indo-European Studies at the University of California, Los
Angeles, USA.
†
Martin L. West was an Honorary Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, UK,
and a Member of the Order of Merit.
Margaret Williamson is Associate Professor Emerita of Classics and
Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, USA.
 A Note on the History of the Lexicon
Christopher Stray

The Lexicon now universally known as Liddell and Scott first appeared in
1843, the work of two young Oxford graduates. Henry George Liddell
(1811–98) and Robert Scott (1811–87) had graduated with first-class honours
in Classics in 1833; Liddell became a student (fellow) of Christ Church, where
they had both been undergraduates, Scott a fellow of Balliol. Both later became
college heads: Scott was Master of Balliol 1854–70, Liddell Dean of Christ
Church 1855–91. They were not only collaborators but firm friends, though
their friendship must have been challenged by the chasm between their
political views: Liddell was a liberal, Scott a conservative of the deepest dye.
The Lexicon was commissioned from the two young graduates in 1836 by a
local bookseller and publisher, David Talboys, who had published several
translations of German works on classical subjects, some of them translated
by himself. The Lexicon too was to begin with a translation, based on a Greek-
German lexicon by Franz Passow, who had died in 1833. The first edition of
Passow’s book had been published in 1819–24, the fourth and final edition in
1831. The first three editions of Liddell and Scott’s Lexicon bore the title,
A Greek-English Lexicon based on the German Work of Francis Passow. In the
fourth edition of 1855, this became A Greek-English Lexicon compiled by
Henry Liddell and Robert Scott, the editors explaining in their preface that
they had added so much material of their own that the Lexicon was now a new
work. The seventh edition of 1882, intended at the time to be the final,
definitive edition, was the last to be revised by both editors, Liddell alone
being responsible for the eighth edition (1897) after Scott’s death in 1887 and
just before his own in 1898. An abridged edition, ‘chiefly for the use of
schools’, was published a few months after the first edition of the larger
work; it was revised several times and is still in print a century after its last
revision. An Intermediate Lexicon assembled by Liddell appeared in 1889, to
cater for the needs of sixth forms and undergraduates. This too is still in print,
but remarkably, it is unchanged from its original publication.
After Liddell’s death, a scheme was hatched to move on from Liddell’s
rather lightly revised final edition to a new work which would take account
of recent discoveries by epigraphers and papyrologists. After some false
starts, the project was taken over by Henry Stuart Jones (1867–1939), a
capable and versatile scholar whose career included work on ancient history
and archaeology as well as on Greek texts. The philologist Roderick McKenzie
xviii A Note on the History of the Lexicon
(1861–1934) was recruited to update Liddell and Scott’s etymologies, and a
stream of material was sent in by British and Continental scholars. LSJ, as it is
now generally called, was published in ten fascicles from 1925 onwards, and
then in two volumes in 1940. Its title page balanced inheritance, collaboration,
and outside assistance: A Greek-English Lexicon compiled by Henry George
Liddell and Robert Scott. A New Edition, Revised and Augmented Throughout
by Sir Henry Stuart Jones D.Litt (1867–1939), with the assistance of Roderick
McKenzie, and with the co-operation of many Scholars. New material, includ-
ing evidence provided by the decipherment of Linear B, was later published in
two Supplements in 1968 and 1996.
 1

Liddell and Scott in Historical Context

Victorian Beginnings, Twentieth-Century Developments

Christopher Stray

Liddell and Scott is so massively familiar a part of the lives of students of Greek
at all levels that we tend to take it for granted: it is just there on the shelf, desk,
or table, waiting to be consulted by the uncertain and appealed to in cases of
dispute. Behind this monumental and impartial familiarity, however, is a
complex history of scholarly controversy and commercial book production.
This chapter sets the first eight editions of the Lexicon (1843–97) in a number
of contemporary contexts: the institutional and intellectual world of Oxford in
the 1830s and 1840s; the emergence of classical dictionaries using vernaculars
rather than Latin for glosses; the relationship of the Lexicon with other
dictionaries; the development of the book through successive editions and
abridgements; the reputation of the Lexicon; and its printing and publishing
history. The chapter will aim to explore these separate contexts, and to suggest
how they interacted.

1 . 1 . E A R L Y V I C T O RI A N O X F O R D : I N S T I T U T I O N A L
AND I NTELLECTUAL CONTEXTS

The Lexicon began life as a commission not from its eventual publisher,
Oxford University Press, but from a local bookseller and publisher, David
Talboys, who since his arrival in the city in 1814 had built up an impressive list
including several translations of German academic works, some of them
translated by himself.¹ Oxford University Press did not have a book in the

¹ Various conjectural dates have been given for the commission. Thompson 1899, 66 7
quotes from a letter in which Liddell tells his friend H.H. Vaughan that he and Scott are about
Christopher Stray, Liddell and Scott in Historical Context: Victorian Beginnings, Twentieth-Century
Developments In: Liddell and Scott: The History, Methodology, and Languages of the World’s Leading
Lexicon of Ancient Greek. Edited by: Christopher Stray, Michael Clarke, and Joshua T. Katz,
Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198810803.003.0001
4 Christopher Stray
field, though this was not for want of trying. In 1827 the Delegates of the Press
had enthusiastically accepted an offer (which they may have encouraged) from
a young Christ Church man, J.A. Cramer, to translate a seventeenth-century
Greek-Latin/Latin-Greek lexicon into English, but in 1830, after printing had
begun, the project was cancelled, for reasons that remain unclear.² In 1829 the
press commissioned another recent Oxford graduate, John Riddle, to translate
the Latin-German dictionary of Immanuel Scheller; this emerged in 1835 as a
single heavy and unwieldy volume printed in three columns. Riddle went on to
produce three progressively abridged versions (1836–43), published not by
OUP but by Longmans. Both this commission and Cramer’s offer were
probably encouraged by Thomas Gaisford, a Press Delegate since 1807 and
regius professor of Greek since 1812; he himself worked extensively on ancient
lexica (Stray 2018, 53–81). Since 1831 Gaisford had been Dean of Christ
Church, the college to which Liddell and Scott belonged as undergraduates;
his support is acknowledged in the preface to the first edition of the Lexicon.
Liddell and Scott, like Cramer and Riddle, were recent graduates with first-
class degrees when commissioned to produce their books—a common pattern
in OUP publishing in this period. The Abridged Lexicon was published shortly
after the large book in 1843, so it had clearly been planned for some time
(cf. note 21 below). This unusual, indeed unique arrangement may have
stemmed from previous abridgements such as Riddle’s Latin dictionaries
and the Tyro’s Lexicon of John Jones (1825), an abridgement of his larger
Greek-English lexicon of 1823, the first work of its kind.
On Liddell’s death in 1898, Thomas Hardy published a poem entitled
‘Liddell and Scott, on the completion of their lexicon’, cast in the form of a
dialogue between the two men. At one point Scott remarks:
. . . how I often, often wondered
What could have led me to have blundered
So far away from sound theology
To dialects and etymology . . .
Hardy’s contrast between sound theology and speculative philology is dra-
matically effective, but does not do justice to Liddell and Scott’s situation in
the midst of Anglican controversy. It is not just that theology and philology
were heavily intertwined in the 1830 and 1840s, but that theology was
becoming a contested area just at the point when Liddell and Scott began

to close an engagement with Talboys to edit the Lexicon. The letter, which Thompson does not
date, was written on 21 November 1836 (Bodleian Library, Ms Eng Let d 435).
² The source lexicon was probably William Robertson’s Thesaurae Graecae Linguae (1676), a
Greek Latin, Latin Greek dictionary This was based on the 1654 lexicon of Cornelis Schrevel,
itself an enlarged revision of the 1562 Greek Latin lexicon of Robert Constantin, which was more
useful than Estienne’s Thesaurus both in its manageable size and in its alphabetical ordering of
entries. For other lexica derived from Schrevel, see n. 13 below.
 Liddell and Scott in Historical Context 5
work. From 1833 Oxford was haunted by the Tractarian controversy, which
culminated in J.H. Newman’s conversion to Catholicism in 1845 (Nockles
1997). In 1838, in a letter to his pupil Henry Acland, Liddell reported that
‘I am still able to plod my weary way through the never ending reams of
Passow’, before telling him that ‘the University’s principle [sic] topic is what
the Cambridge scoffers call “New-mania” . . . There are men who have (as it
were) a call to higher things . . . most of us . . . knew (thank God for it) what we
ought to believe, & what . . . we engaged steadily in following & doing, without
constant speculation . . .’³ Liddell’s account reflects a concern to avoid contro-
versy in which the steady pursuit of philological projects surely played a useful
role. One of his and Scott’s final degree examiners was William Sewell, an
eccentric high Anglican who at first supported the Tractarians, and who has
been credited with suggesting the Lexicon project. In his biography of Liddell,
Henry Thompson hinted that Sewell proposed the project as a way of avoiding
the obsession with theology in the University (Thompson 1899, 66–7).
Thompson quotes from a letter from Liddell to H.H. Vaughan (referred to
above, n.1) in which he wrote that ‘Sewell thinks the Oxford mind is running
too much to pure Theology: if you think so too, you will be glad to hear that
some of us are—in all likelihood—about to close an engagement with Talboys
for a lexicon founded chiefly on Passow.’
The nexus of theology and philology has been explored by Linda Dowling in
her Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle (Dowling 1986),
where she discusses the work of Julius Hare, Connop Thirlwall, and their
Philological Museum (1831–3). She also mentions Passow’s lexicon (p. 58), but
as a precursor to the Oxford English Dictionary: Liddell and Scott do not
appear. Yet in the period from Passow’s death in 1833 to R.C. Trench’s
proposal of a new English dictionary in 1857, it was the Greek lexicon
which carried the Passow standard, with entries which laid out the biographies
of words.⁴ The links between theology and philology can be seen in the careers
of William Wordsworth’s nephews Charles and Christopher Wordsworth,
schoolmasters who became bishops. They had been brought up as Tories
and high Anglicans, and in the 1830s, when liberalism and political reform
was in the air and the Tractarian controversy was at its height, were concerned
to bolster established religion and conservative morality. As scholars, they felt
that classical literature should be used to defend revealed religion; as school-
masters, that (in Christopher’s words) ‘uniformity in grammar is no inconsid-
erable step towards uniformity in religion’ (italics in original: see Stray 2016).
The brothers vigorously refought the religious battles of the late Roman
Empire and the Reformation, but their isolation was heightened when their
erstwhile ally Gladstone went over to liberal policies in the late 1840s. In 1847,

³ Liddell to Acland, 23 April 1838. Liddell papers, Christ Church library, MS 348.
⁴ For useful context, see Aarsleff 1983, 249 58; Zgusta 2006, 27 38.
6 Christopher Stray
Charles Wordsworth wrote to J.R. Hope, ‘WEG has let us down, abandoned
the high ground and the sure ground, the mission to save Church and
State’, and went on to urge uniformity in religion in Britain. D.C. Latham
commented on this statement, ‘Wordsworth was left in the fortress raised by
his own imagination, secure, had he but known it, in the fact that it would
never again be thought worthy of a serious attack’ (Latham 1910, I.372–3).
Philology also loomed large in the work of such liberal Anglicans as Julius
Hare, Connop Thirlwall, and Thomas Arnold (see Brent 1983; Morris 2004).
The impact of the Tractarian debates can be seen in the measured pro-
nouncement of the Royal Commissioners on Oxford. In their report, issued in
1852, they supported the establishments of professorships, remarking that:
The presence of men eminent in various departments of knowledge would impart
a dignity and stability to the whole institution . . . whilst from within it would tend
above all other means to guard the university from being absorbed, as it has been
of late years, by the agitations of theological controversy.
(Royal Commission 1852, 52; cf. O.Chadwick 1970, 440)
Looking back on the Tractarian era and its aftermath, Mark Pattison
commented that:
If any Oxford man had gone to sleep in 1846 and had woke up again in 1850 he
would have found himself in a totally new world. In 1846 we were in Old Tory
Oxford; not somnolent because it was fiercely debating, as in the days of Henry
IV., its eternal Church question. . . . In 1850 this was all suddenly changed as if by
the wand of a magician. The dead majorities of head and seniors, which had sat
like lead upon the energies of young tutors, had melted away. Theology was
totally banished from Common Room, and even from private conversation.⁵
Even after the Tractarian controversy had died away, divisions between
religious conservatives and liberals played a part in Oxford appointments.
In 1855 Benjamin Jowett was appointed to the regius chair of Greek. Soon
afterwards, Arthur Stanley wrote to him that he had not pressed Jowett’s claims
to the chair on Liddell, since he did not want Jowett to get lost in that sort of
work: it would have been better to wait for something more important. Stanley
went on, ‘I should have been inclined to let Scott have it. He would be less
dangerous there than in a theological field.’⁶ (Stanley was alluding to Scott’s
theological conservatism.) He and Jowett must have been unhappy at Scott’s
election in 1861 to the chair of Biblical exegesis, which came in the wake of
renewed religious controversy after the publication of a volume of liberal
theological studies, Essays and Reviews, to which Jowett contributed (Ellis

⁵ Mark Pattison, Memoirs (London, 1885), 244; see also 212 15, 244 5. For the veiled role
played by OUP reprints of sermons by Anglican divines, see Ledger Lomas 2013.
⁶ Oxford, Balliol College Archives, MS 410. Stanley to Jowett, 29 June 1855. Quoted by
permission of the Master and fellows, Balliol College, Oxford.
 Liddell and Scott in Historical Context 7
1980; Hinchliff 1982). My conclusion is that the motivation of Sewell, and
perhaps of Liddell and Scott too, was one of avoidance, and that once the
currently controversial realm of theology had been escaped, lexicography could
proceed in an autonomous fashion. Thomas Hardy would thus have been
more historically accurate had he contrasted ‘sound philology’ with ‘speculative
theology’. Greek lexicography was seen as relatively uncontentious—except when
it dealt with New Testament Greek. There had been vigorous debates in the 1820s
about the role played by theological agendas in the making of dictionaries
in that area, for example in that of Parkhurst.⁷ Liddell and Scott have not,
however, escaped posthumous denunciation from those who believe that the
King James version of the Bible is alone inspired. Gail Riplinger, who belongs to
the wilder shores of this movement, has alleged that Cecil Rhodes, who travelled
with the Lexicon in Natal in the 1870s, had his faith corrupted by it. For her, in
fact, the Lexicon, as the source of later dictionaries used in Bible study, is ‘the
whorish mother of all harlot lexicons’.⁸

1.2. THE VERNACULAR TURN

One of the most striking aspects of the Preface to the first edition (1843) is
Liddell and Scott’s defence of their decision to use English rather than Latin
for their glosses and explanations. ‘It may be asked’, they write, ‘whether such
a Lexicon should not be in Latin, as in the old times; whether the other is not
an unworthy condescension to the indolence of the age.’ Their response
distinguishes between a lexicon and notes to classical authors. The latter,
they claim, are best couched in Latin, which has an established technical
vocabulary and is universally understood; English, however, is far better
equipped to render the ‘richness, boldness, freedom, and variety of Greek
words’. They conclude that ‘A Frenchman may have reason for using a Greek-
Latin lexicon; an Englishman can have none’ (LS¹, iii). Their distinction
between lexicons and commentaries constitutes an intervention in a contem-
porary debate about the use of English in classical books. This was to become
common over the next two decades but in 1843 was controversial, denounced
by conservatives as a surrender to modernity and populism. The controversy

⁷ Parkhurst’s lexicon of New Testament Greek (1769) was Greek English, and his preface
makes clear his reformation agenda; the preface to the large scale revision of 1829 by the
conservative theologian Hugh James Rose is heavily critical of Parkhurst’s theological/philological
views. The first Greek English lexicon published in Britain (a lexicon of NT Greek) was that of
Thomas Cokayne of Corpus Christi College, Oxford; it appeared in 1658, twenty years after his
death. On Cokayne’s and Parkhurst’s lexicons, see Lee 2003, 88 95.
⁸ Riplinger 2008, 208, 83. The quality of her scholarship is evident from her belief that the
Lexicon was the first ever Greek English lexicon, and that ‘football’ derives from ‘Baal’.
8 Christopher Stray
was largely focused on the language used in schoolbooks, and Liddell and
Scott’s preface aims to deflect potential conservative objections by distinguish-
ing between this genre and that of lexicons. They bolster their case by
listing English precursors, including the Cambridge classical scholar Charles
Blomfield, by this time Bishop of London, and Alexander Nicoll, a former
professor of Hebrew at Oxford (LS¹, iv n.a).⁹
Liddell and Scott go on to refer to the Greek-German lexicon on which they
based their work, that of Franz Passow (first edition 1819–24). It was Passow
who had urged that a dictionary entry for a word should tell its history, a
principle adopted not only by Liddell and Scott but also later on by James
Murray for the OED (Considine 2015). They also refer to the earlier book by
Johann Gottlob Schneider on which Passow had drawn (last edition 1819).
Though they do not make the point explicitly, this represents another justifi-
cation for their decision to use the vernacular: that their German predecessors,
working within the dominant European scholarly formation of the era, had
followed the same path. The shift to the vernacular in Germany formed part of
a wider movement in Europe involving changes of fashion in publishing and
the emergence of large-scale dictionaries fuelled by ideologies of romantic
nationalism.¹⁰ Liddell and Scott’s choice of the vernacular belonged to a wider
revalorizing of English and Englishness which led to the exploration of
regional dialects, the study of Anglo-Saxon by John Kemble and others
(Frantzen 1990, 50–61), and the celebration of Shakespeare as a national
treasure (Taylor 1990, 162–230).

1.3. THE LEXICON AND OTHER DICTIONARIES

Liddell and Scott made no bones about basing their book on that of Franz
Passow, or about discussing this in their preface. It was common for lexicon-
makers to select as source a dictionary whose author was dead, and it may well
have been Passow’s death in 1833 which prompted David Talboys, who had
published (and himself translated) several German works, to approach Liddell
(or Scott) to make the Lexicon. Passow’s name remained on the title page until
the fourth edition, when Liddell and Scott justified its removal by referring to

⁹ It is worth noting that politically or religiously radical precursors like Gilbert Wakefield,
who had planned a Greek English lexicon in the 1790s, and John Jones, whose pioneering
lexicon of 1823 has already been referred to, are not mentioned in the 1843 preface (see Stray
2010b, 102).
¹⁰ For publishing, see Febvre and Martin 1997; for dictionaries, Hass 2012; cf. Leerssen 2006,
200 1. The nationalist current also interacted with the tradition of academy dictionaries which
had begun in the early seventeenth century (Considine 2014).
 Liddell and Scott in Historical Context 9
the substantial expansion and revision they had carried out; they pointed out
in their preface that Schneider’s name had disappeared from the fourth edition
of Passow’s lexicon for the same reason. The other lexicon which must have
loomed large in Liddell and Scott’s thinking, however, is not named in their
preface. In declining to list other Greek-English lexicons, on the grounds of
lack of space and a concern to avoid invidious comment, they nevertheless
remark that ‘the most popular of these Lexicons now abroad’ closely resembles
their own, but that this is because both books draw on Passow—though their
rival has made ‘slow and scanty acknowledgment of the amount of his debt’
(LS¹, iv). The allusion is to the lexicon of the Irish physician James Donnegan,
whose first edition had appeared in 1826 (Donnegan 1826); a fourth edition
was published in 1842.¹¹ Donnegan’s book, which had been revised and
enlarged in each edition (first edition 1148pp, fourth edition 1743pp), was
the market leader in Britain when Liddell and Scott’s first edition came out.¹²
Donnegan’s book was based on the Greek-German lexicon of I.J.G. Schneider
(1797–8), unlike two other Greek-English dictionaries which appeared in
1826, which were both based on the 1654 Greek-Latin lexicon of the Dutch
scholar Cornelis Schrevel.¹³ As can be seen, Liddell and Scott take the moral
high ground, but an earlier draft of their preface had included a highly critical
examination of Donnegan’s book which took up almost half of their preface.¹⁴
They begin this by declaring that it was ‘insufficient’ for both beginners and
scholars because the arrangement of material was ‘random, disorderly and
perplexed’ and the book was inaccurate throughout. They go on to consider
several samples from Donnegan’s lexicon, of which I quote one as an example.
Having noted twenty-five false references in Schweighaeuser’s lexicon to
Herodotus, they checked them in Donnegan’s text, and found that only one

¹¹ Little is known about Donnegan, an Irishman who received an MD in Edinburgh in 1809

and probably died in the early 1840s. In the 2nd edition of his book (1831), he acknowledges help
from Karl Hase, who was beginning to assemble a new edition of Estienne’s Greek thesaurus in
Paris (see Petitmengin 1983).
¹² His 3rd edition (1837) is referred to in a contemporary satire as the ‘costing a pound
more Done Again Lexicon’ (Anon. 1837).
¹³ Schrevelius’ Greek Lexicon, translated into English (London: Baldwin & Cradock, 1826)
included a Latin Greek dictionary; it was probably edited by John Richardson Major, whose
name appears in the 2nd edition of 1831, where the Latin Greek dictionary of the original
replaced by an English Greek section. The Greek Lexicon of Schrevelius, Translated into English,
with Many Additions (Boston: Cummings and Hilliard, 1826) was edited by John Pickering and
Daniel Oliver. George Dunbar and Edmund Barker’s A Greek English, English Greek Lexicon
(Edinburgh: Maclachlan and Stewart, 1831) was also based on Schrevel.
¹⁴ This reached proof stage, and survives in the OUP Archive (OUP/PB/12954). Quotations
from the Archive are given by permission of the Secretary to the Delegates of Oxford University
Press. When Aarsleff (1983, 252) referred to Liddell and Scott’s ‘admirably brief 6 page
Preface’, he was presumably unaware of the suppressed preface with its lengthy denunciation
of Donnegan.
10 Christopher Stray
had been corrected by him. They go on remorselessly to pile up evidence
against their hapless rival, adding that most of the errors were present in his
second edition of 1831, but had still not been corrected in his fourth (1842).¹⁵
In the draft preface, Liddell and Scott follow their declaration that an
Englishman has no reason to use a Greek-Latin lexicon (quoted above) with
the following words:
Nor is this a mere opinion of our own. A Greek English Lexicon has been
demanded often and by high authorities; has been undertaken more than once
by able scholars; nay, there at present several before the world which command a
large sale. And this brings us to a second objection.
2. For, it may be asked, are there not Greek English lexicons enough? Is not
Dr. Donnegan’s in its Fourth Edition? Why write another?
To answer this objection will be an invidious task. But we will not therefore
decline it.
In the published preface, the last two sentences are replaced by these:
It might be expected that we should here take such notice of these Lexicons as to
justify our adding another to the list. We could easily do so. But at this time and in
this place we decline the task; partly because it is an invidious one, and might be
attributed to other motives than serving the cause of truth and good
Scholarship . . .
After adding that they also reluctant to overload their preface with a detailed
critique, Liddell and Scott take a parting shot at Donnegan, though without
naming him:
if in the most popular of these Lexicons now abroad, there are found resem
blances to ours . . . , the reason hereof is that we have both been indebted to
Passow, though the Author of the Lexicon we allude to has made slow and
scanty acknowledgment of his debt.
What are we to make of the somewhat cryptic phrase ‘at this time and in
this place’? I suggest that this is a veiled allusion to the Tractarian contro-
versy raging in Oxford in 1843: neither the suppressed nor the published
preface is dated, but it is unlikely to have been composed much before
publication in the summer of 1843. Donnegan’s name was Irish, and so
might have suggested that he was a Catholic; sufficient reason perhaps to
avoid a controversy which could be glimpsed only in Liddell and Scott’s use
of ‘partly’.

¹⁵ J. Enoch Powell also had a poor opinion of Schweighaeuser’s lexicon, which he called ‘a
pretence of a lexicon . . . I have counted more than twelve hundred words used by Herodotus
which it omits . . . ’: J.E. Powell, A Lexicon to Herodotus (Cambridge, 1938), viii.
 Liddell and Scott in Historical Context 11

1.4. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE LEXICON

THROUGH I TS EIGHT VICTORIAN EDITIONS

‘Lexicography is an endless task’.

(Robert Scott to Wilhelm Dindorf, 9 April 1862¹⁶)
After contracting with Talboys, the two editors divided up the essential tasks.
Passow had based his own book on a reading of Homer, and by the time of his
death in 1833 had extended its coverage only to post-Homeric epic and
Herodotus, the latter rather thinly. Liddell and Scott began by working on
Herodotus and Thucydides, taking one author each. They worked on the book
together almost every day; looking back in the 1890s, Liddell remembered that
‘Robert Scott (then Fellow of Balliol) used to come to my rooms in Christ
Church every evening at 7 o’clock to work at our Greek lexicon.’¹⁷ Liddell
stayed in Oxford till his marriage in 1846 obliged him to give up his fellowship;
he returned as Dean of Christ Church in 1855. Scott had married and left
Oxford in 1840 for a rural living, returning on his election as Master of Balliol
in 1854. The final stages of work on the first edition were thus probably carried
out largely by Liddell, while Scott held the Balliol living of Duloe in Cornwall
(1840–50). In his 1898 poem ‘Liddell and Scott, on the completion of their
lexicon’, discussed above, Thomas Hardy has Scott say:
‘I almost wished we’d not begun.
Even now, if people only knew
My sinkings, as we slowly drew
Along through Kappa, Lambda, Mu,
They’d be concerned at my misgiving,
And how I mused on a College living
Right down to Sigma,
But feared a stigma
If I succumbed, and left old Donnegan
For weary freshmen’s eyes to con again.’¹⁸
In fact, it was the letter π which most alarmed Liddell: in July 1842 he wrote to
Scott (Fig. 1.1.):
You will be glad to hear that I have all but finished Π, that two legged monster,
who must in ancient times have worn his legs a straddle, Λ else he could never

¹⁶ Robert Scott letter books, OUP Archive.

¹⁷ Oxford, Balliol College Archives. Jowett Papers IIA.21.95. Undated memories of Jowett,
written after Jowett’s death in 1893. Quoted by permission of the Master and Fellows, Balliol
College, Oxford.
¹⁸ Hardy had bought a second hand copy of the second (1832) edition of Donnegan’s lexicon
in 1858, at a time when he was a poorly paid apprentice architect; as an old copy of a superseded
book, it must have been much cheaper than the current (1855) edition of Liddell and Scott,
which was selling at 31s. 6d.
12 Christopher Stray

Fig. 1.1. The monstrous letter Π, depicted by Henry Liddell in his letter to Robert
Scott of July 1842 (Thompson 1899, 75).

have strode over such enormous a space as he has occupied and will occupy in
Lexicons. Behold the monster, as he has been mocking my waking and sleeping
visions for the last many months.¹⁹

David Talboys died in May 1840, and in October that year OUP took the book
over; Liddell and Scott were given £500 each on account, and in the following
month they were given an additional £150 for translating Passow’s German,
and promised £1.10s per sheet for correcting proofs.²⁰
In the process of revision, Liddell and Scott were helped by several other
scholars, most of them outside Oxford. In Germany, Karl Wilhelm Dindorf of
Göttingen, a prolific scholar who had been publishing with OUP for some
time, became involved at an early stage, and supplied large amounts of
material for revision (Stray 2013b, 447–8). He and his brother Ludwig August
had been recruited in the 1830s to work on the new edition of Estienne’s
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, published by the Paris firm of Didot from 1831 to
1865, and thus had substantial material to offer (see Petitmengin 1983).
In Scotland, William Veitch, whose Greek Irregular Verbs was published by
OUP in 1866, also sent comments. For later editions, material was received
from leading American scholars, notably Henry Drisler (Columbia), William
Goodwin (Harvard), and Basil Gildersleeve (Johns Hopkins). In Oxford, Liddell’s
ex-pupil George Marshall of Christ Church checked all the references for the
first edition, and also produced the Abridged version (1843).²¹ Another import-
ant figure was the Press’s reader Philip Molyneux, whom we shall meet later on.

¹⁹ Thompson 1899, 74 5. The letter π occupied 221 pages in the first edition, second only to
α (236pp).
²⁰ £500 is the equivalent of £53,000 at 2018 values.
²¹ It is not clear when the decision was made to assemble this. The order to print 3000 copies
of the larger lexicon was given by the OUP Delegates on 25 March 1841; on 7 May, they were
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