 Welcome to the Endless Knot! Today I'm taking over Mark's video to unbox the dictionary of my own, the Oxford Latin Dictionary. I'm going to review the revised edition and explain why it's a useful reference for a classicist. And then, for comparison in a separate video, you can watch Mark review the Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary and explain its usefulness for medievalists. So, here's the box. So I'm going to open it up, see what's inside. I'm excited because it's two volumes. It should be easier to work with than the original one volume. Okay, let's see what we have. A packing material and an invoice. It is, let's just say, not cheap. Oxford Latin Dictionary. It'll cite to delight any classicist's eyes. And here we have it. So, it's in a case. Two volumes. All nicely bound. It's a fancy case. Let me take the plastic off. There we go. All right. A nice case. Two volumes. So, I'm going to open that up and take a look at the two volumes. The reason for going to two volumes is apparently because of the problems of the binding. And I know that's certainly true of the version I have of the first edition. The binding breaks very easily because it's such a big book and pages come out and it doesn't work very well. So, that's why they wanted to go to two volumes for this one. So, here we have Oxford Latin Dictionary edited by PGW Glare. Second edition. So, if you open up the dictionary and you want to use it. First, there's the preface and the introduction. But then, a very important part of it is the bibliographical guide, which talks about all the authors and works that are included in this dictionary and gives you the abbreviations that are used both for the authors and for their works. This is useful for a number of reasons. First of all, I should mention that the time period that the Oxford Latin Dictionary covers is fairly restricted. It's from the beginning of classical Latin, the earliest Latin that we have, down to approximately 200 AD. Though that final border is a bit loose because it includes a few authors in Justinian's Digest, for instance, who go into the third century, but it excludes several of the earliest patristic writers who are in the second century because the decision was made to exclude Christian Latin from the Oxford Latin Dictionary. And that is probably considered one of the chief limitations of this dictionary is that it doesn't cover the Christian writers and it doesn't cover later Latin. So there's a lot of words that simply aren't in it. So all of the authors that are included, it's not comprehensive, not every single author that was in that period that's covered is in here. But when they did include an author, they attempted to include all the works by that author. So one of the useful things that this bibliographical guide can do is if you want to know what works a given author wrote that survive, you can come and actually look them up here. So you can go through, you can see, for instance, all of those works by Cicero. There are quite a lot of works by Cicero. Then this is new because this wasn't in the first edition, a guide to the dictionary. The first edition did explain some of the terminology, but it didn't have a nice illustration like this. So it tells you there's the headword, variant spellings of the headword, and then it also shows you if you've got a headword where it shows the inflections, for instance, M&Ns because it comes originally from a present participle. It has a slightly unusual formation of the comparative and the superlative. So that's written in what part of speech it is, the quotations that illustrate the headword, cross-references to another headword. So anyway, this page gives you indications of how to use and how to read the dictionary entries, which is very useful, especially if you're not used to Latin dictionaries. So you can see it goes on to tell you about when it includes etymological information. There's not a massive amount of etymological information included in the Oxford Latin dictionary. If you want more, you go to one of the specialized Latin etymological sources. This is again, this is definitely clarified and made more readable for modern students and anyone, scholars in general, how the dictionary is organized and what their conventions are, which things like whether they mark the vowel length and things like that. All right, I think I'll take a moment to look at some words. You can see I definitely think it's better laid out. If you compare this to the previous edition and that's one of the major changes, they've changed the font, a larger or slightly larger, but definitely more readable font. I think it's a lot clearer physically for reading it, which is very nice. It's really not very difficult to look at this page and know where the headwords are. They're in bold, they're well laid out, they're clearly differentiated from the rest of the text. The quotations are in a slightly smaller font, so they're also fairly easily distinguished from the actual senses and each of the definitions is laid out with a line break between. So it's very clear you can go down and see one, two, three, four, five, all of those separate meanings are divided very clearly and each one has its own set of quotations. So it's easy to read or at least comparatively easy to read. There's a lot of information still. This is not a children's dictionary. Also these tabs, this is new, the colored tab so that you can find your way through the various letters. I thought I'd look up the word Fidesz. All right, you can see that Fidesz is a long word with multiple meanings. I will obviously not read all of those, but it goes on and on and on. That's Fidesz with the basic sense of the condition of having trust placed in one, trust or tutelage. The thing about a word like Fidesz is that it has a lot of meanings and it has a lot of different shades of meanings that are appropriate for different contexts. If you use just a pocket dictionary, which in many contexts is the right thing to use when you're just translating a lot of text for school or for other purposes, those senses will probably be listed but they'll be listed just in a short set of five or six of different words or 10, 15, 20 synonyms. There won't be much indication given how those meanings have changed. The reason this dictionary is so useful is because they've gone back to the original texts, gathered up all the words from all the texts and then checked and given you a whole bunch of citations. You can look and see which authors have used the words in which senses, what kind of idioms turn up in different authors. So as an exclamation, for instance, profidem, who uses that? Well, Enneas does and Plautus does and Cicero does and Salist and Livy. And you can see where they've used it and there's examples given. Then you can go and look those words up. So you can go and look in the Tusculin Disputations, for instance. To see how Cicero's used it, what kind of emotional context it has, what its appropriate rhetorical structure is, that sort of thing doesn't come up in a pocket dictionary. You don't get that information. This is where you can see the benefit of having this kind of a dictionary. It's not necessarily important for your day-to-day translation, but if you're going to do detailed work on a text, you really want to have a good sense of the full range of possible meanings of a word, which words are used in which meanings by which authors and how. That's what this dictionary can give you. So I am thrilled to have this. I think it's lovely, and I'm really glad to have this and to have it accessible to me for my work. So since I mainly deal with classical Latin, as the OLD is the best Latin dictionary available, and it's definitely the dictionary record for classical scholarship, along with the thesaurus linguae latina when it covers the word you're looking up. But it's not the only choice, and it might not be the best choice for everyone. If you want to know more about the other main possibility, you can click here, or check the description below, to see me talk about the Lewis and Short Latin dictionary, which I tend to prefer. I'll be back soon with more etymological explorations and cultural connections, so please subscribe to this channel. You can also sign up for email notifications of new videos in the description below. If you have comments or questions, I'm at alliterative on Twitter, or leave them in the comment section. You can also read more of my thoughts on my blog at alliterative.net.