The Greek-Spanish Dictionary (DGE)

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The Greek-Spanish Dictionary (DGE) is the last link in the long chain of European lexicographical tradition of general dictionaries of Ancient Greek, the beginning of which can be considered Henricus Stephanus's Thesaurus Graecae Linguae (Paris 1572). The Greek-Spanish Dictionary resumes this tradition at the level reached by its immediate predecessor, Liddell-Scott-Jones's (LSJ) dictionary, in its ninth edition (Oxford 1925-1940). Through many years this project, which is carried out in the Department of Classics of the Institute of Philology of the CSIC (Madrid), has got funds from the Spanish Ministry of Education in several ways, lately through «Acciones Especiales». It also has been supported at several moments by worthy Foundations, such as the March Foundation or the A.G. Leventis Foundation.

At the beginning the goals that we aimed at were not so ambitious as now. Having in mind a public consisting of university students, we basically attempted to adapt into Spanish the best existing Greek dictionaries. We also intended to supplement them in disregarded fields, replace their editions, frequently very old, with new, better ones; also, to correct eventual mistakes.

Nevertheless, at the very beginning of the work, we already noticed how the necessity was felt in the field of Classical Philology of a new bilingual dictionary from Ancient Greek into a modern language. Such a dictionary had necessarily to be based on a wider collection of materials, as well as on a new careful study and organization of those materials according to modern lexicographical criteria, taking profit of recent advances in linguistics. LSJ's splendid dictionary, which our daily work makes us duly appraise, was, regrettably enough, in many senses out of date, in spite of its Supplements. Greek lexicon was thus in need of a thorough revision.

That revision involved, first, incorporating Mycenaean Greek and Patristic lexicon, as well as personal and place names, which were all absent from LSJ. Besides, the increasing mass of words showing up in new literary and documentary texts, new critical editions of well-known texts, and the necessary revision of their interpretation in the light of the current state of the art imposed writing up a dictionary with newly renovated bases. As for the etymological part, the tremendous development of Indo-European linguistics all along the 20th century had also to be taken into account.