 Welcome to the Endless Knot. Today I'm reviewing the Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary and explaining why it's a useful reference for a medievalist. And then, for comparison, in a separate video you can watch AVEN review the Oxford Latin Dictionary and explain its usefulness for a classicist. All right, so this is a Latin Dictionary by Lewis and Short, and I'm commonly referred to simply as Lewis and Short, currently published by Oxford, Oxford University Press. There's a sort of story behind its publication history that I'll get into in a minute. I bought this when I was a graduate student. It's a little bit bashed up by this point, but I have it still wrapped in this plastic dust jacket it came in. But let me open it to the title page here. What I want to talk about is why this dictionary had to be replaced with the new work of the Oxford Latin Dictionary and why it's still available and still desired as a tool by many scholars. So as you can see from the title page it says A Latin Dictionary, founded on Andrew's edition of Freund's Latin Dictionary, Revised, Enlarged, and In Great Part Rewritten by Charlton T. Lewis. This dictionary was not an originally produced work of scholarship. It has a long history. So this German scholar that is mentioned here, Freund, he wrote a Latin Dictionary, a Latin to German Dictionary, I should say. At the time, Freund said he was producing a new dictionary on modern scientific linguistic principles. He set out to do this, but after working on it for a while, he found the work very tedious and difficult. So instead he ended up doing an abridgment of an 18th century Italian scholar, Fortulini, and did so essentially without crediting him. So it is essentially at least a partially plagiarized work. I guess a Freund in need does what he needs to. So this dictionary has its faults, but was in any case quite useful, better than a lot of what was easily available at the time, and so it was decided to translate it into English for the use of English scholars. This work was done by Ethan Andrews in the 19th century, and that dictionary was found to be quite useful and was quite popular for a while. Andrews was an American scholar and was published by an American publishing house Harper's. It was decided after a while to produce a new edition of this. Finally, the dictionary ended up in the hands of the scholar Short, Charles Short. The plans for it anyways were devised by Short. He made a number of suggestions that seemed to have been carried forward, including the expansion of ecclesiastical vocabulary, various late Latin and Christian writers. Most of this dictionary is actually edited by Lewis. So it initially came out in the United States as Harper's Latin dictionary. When it came out in England, a number of late 19th century and early 20th century scholars were quite critical of some of the shortcomings of the dictionary. And a lot of this has to do with the very long history of the scholarship here. As I say, it initially started out as an 18th century bit of scholarship revised by a number of different scholars over the over the years, but it was more than 100 years old by that point. And so many scholars, including one academic who ended up becoming the first editor of the Oxford Latin dictionary, which eventually got off the ground, Alexander Souter, he was extremely critical of Lewis and Short. And he argued that they needed to produce a new dictionary. It also, of course, made financial sense for the press rather than paying an American publisher the rights to reproduce their material. If they produce their own dictionary, then they wouldn't have to do that. So it's clear why this dictionary had to be replaced. It's very old scholarship. The layout of the thing also makes it less useful. It's very dense, very small type. The sense divisions, although they use bold face to show the headwords. And then for the large sense divisions, they at least put those numberings in bold type. But for the most part, they don't put any line breaks anywhere. And only the major sense divisions are given in bold type. So for the more minor sense division, you kind of have to scan through the thing to find the sense you want. And it's very easy to miss stuff that way. So why does this thing still exist? Why was I still able to buy it then if it was essentially rendered obsolete by more modern practices? Well, the reason for that, of course, is the scope. The Oxford Latin Dictionary has a cutoff date of basically AD 200. So it doesn't include Christian writers, it doesn't include late Latin writers. And that is something that is at least somewhat included in Lewis and Short, though it's not absolutely comprehensive in terms of its coverage of late Latin and Christian writers. But it covers at least a number of major authors in those categories. So there's some vocabulary that you will find in Lewis and Short that you will not find in the Oxford Latin Dictionary. And there are some senses of words, senses that developed later that you can find in Lewis and Short that you will not find in the Oxford Latin Dictionary. So for those reasons, Oxford kept Lewis and Short in print. It's still available. I bought my copy in the 1990s. And of course, at that time, it was a decision. Do I buy Lewis and Short? Do I buy the Oxford Latin Dictionary at the time in its first edition? And for my purposes as a medievalist, it made sense to get Lewis and Short even though it was an older work of scholarship. But nevertheless, the coverage of a lot of vocabulary useful for medieval Latin made the decision for me. Given its age, this means it is also made available online in various electronic formats. You can download apps to work to run on a phone or tablet. You can access it on web pages. It's accessible through the Perseus website, so linked to the texts as well. I often access this now, most often through the Logheon website, which has a number of dictionaries, not only Lewis and Short, but little in Scott for Greek and a number of other Latin dictionaries and all searchable. Because of its age, it is now available in all these other formats due to the fact that there are no copyright restrictions anymore on it. So this dictionary does give citations, and I think at the time it was particularly thought that and was accepted even by I suppose the critics that even if there were some deficiencies in the senses and the lexicographical information that one could still get a sense of the usage and specifics of meaning by carefully reading through all of the citations. So it does include citations. Obviously, if you have the resources to buy many dictionaries, you might want to have both the Oxford Latin Dictionary and Lewis and Short, or you have to make that decision based on what sort of Latin you're reading. Now that even has purchased the second edition of the Oxford Latin Dictionary, I'm in the enviable position of having inherited her old copy of the first edition, so I've got easy access to both dictionaries. Okay, so that's it for Lewis and Short. So since when I look up Latin, I'm usually working from a medieval text. For my purposes, the Lewis and Short is better than the OLD. Though it's not a perfect dictionary, it's a good all-round dictionary for those interested in both classical Latin and later Christian and medieval Latin if you don't want to or can't afford to buy the OLD and one of the separate and very expensive medieval Latin dictionaries, and it has the particular benefit of being available for free in electronic format. 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 Oxford Latin Dictionary, which I 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.