The thing itself, the grand old thing, is one hundred and fifty-three years old. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott—both born in 1811 and both Firsts at Oxford in 1833—published the first edition of A Greek-English Lexicon in 1843, six years into the reign of Victoria. During Liddell’s lifetime, it went through eight ever-expanding and improving editions. Liddell died in 1898 at the age of eighty-seven, co-creator of one of the glories of nineteenth-century practical scholarship. He and Scott rank with James Murray of the OED, with the compilers of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and with Leslie Stephen, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, as wonderfully synthesizing minds. Look, for instance, at the six columns that take logos from “the account of money handled” to “the Word or Wisdom of God.” Liddell, like Stephen, has had his fame eclipsed by that of a daughter: Liddell’s daughter was the Alice of Wonderland; Stephen’s daughter was Virginia Woolf, resentful and scribbling. (The Henry/Alice/Carroll configuration might be an unwritten Henry James story.)

Sir Henry Stuart Jones then took up the never-finished work, but the snaillike pace of his labor (he seems to have been a bit of a Casaubon) meant that the ninth edition of the dictionary (commonly referred to as LSJ) in 1940 was posthumous; Sir Henry had died in 1939. There was a Supplement in 1968, and there has now come out a new, extensively revised and enlarged Supplement, amounting to three hundred and twenty large pages. It is printed both with LSJ and as a separate volume ($65).

What does the Supplement do? Three things, mainly. First, it adds new words and usages found on recently discovered (often late) papyri. Many of these are transliterations of Latin words; this was the Empire. A few have the charm of “Blops: onomatopoeic word expressing sound of drops falling into water.”

Secondly, corrections of earlier imperfections or outright errors are made in the Supplement. When reading a good critical edition of a Greek text—say, W. S. Barrett’s edition of Euripides’ Hippolytus or K. J. Dover’s edition of Aristophanes’ Clouds— one notes their sometimes exasperated chidings of LS or LSJ and wonders if the rebukes are ever heeded. I checked a few: in the Hippolytus the cliffs where Hippolytus will crash are called thalassei synnomoi. LSJ had “that lie between two seas,” which Barrett called “absurd.” He translated, “That consort with the sea”; LS Rev. Sup. now reads “which consort with the sea.” Barrett’s correction of syrinx from “hole in the nave” to the wheel-nave itself is accepted, while his insistence that antyx means not the “bridge” of a lyre but the “whole framework” is ignored. In The Clouds, Dover read the moistness in drosos as referring to “Cowper’s secretion” from the penis and noted, dryly, that “LSJ … curiously refers to the cheeks.” LS Rev. Sup. has yielded to Dover. With sexual words generally, LS Rev. Sup. speaks more plainly than earlier editions. Thus, binein, the commonest word for “fuck,” is defined as “coarse wd. for to have sexual intercourse.” This is an improvement on LSJ’s pudent retreat behind Latin—they define the word as “inire, coïre”; British schoolboys are no longer thought of, I guess, as in danger from Greek wordspotting. But it is still well short of what a grown-up lexicon should do. Apropos of dirty words, I see that a new dildo-compound—olisbodokos, receiving the dildo—has been restored in Sappho. You’d never know, though, from LSJ or LS Rev. Sup. exactly what an olisbos is, unless you could translate the Latin they decorously supply for young readers.

The odd lexical correction can be immensely important in, say, philosophy. LS Rev. Sup. tells us that, the only time it occurs in Plato’s Republic, theologia means not “science of things divine” but “talk about gods.”

Thirdly, LS Rev. Sup. includes “Mycenean”—that is, the early (c. 1200 B.C.) form of Greek found on the Linear B tablets. The problem is that Mycenean used a syllabic script with characters difficult to reproduce, while this is an alphabetically ordered lexicon. The solution adopted here is to spell out Mycenean signs in Roman transliteration and to place such words at the end of Greek entries representing later—and sometimes very different—forms of the same word. This is “to warn the user that the word occurred in the Linear B texts.”

The result is bizarre and virtually useless. It doesn’t work at all as a Mycenean-into-Greek or Mycenean-into-English lexicon. Say you’ve run across a Mycenean word that could be Romanized as qa-si-re-u and have no idea what it means. Good luck. There’s no qa in later Greek. Check beta. It is under basileus, king! If you are looking up oinos, wine, you might or might not be interested to note that Myceneans drank wo-no. And they cooked with the oil of the e-ra-wo. And the palace bowmaker was called a to-ko-so-wo-ko (Mycenean for the hypothetical toxourgos). Of course no one actually spoke such gibberish, which sounds like the argot of Japanese torturers in a World War II film. The Mycenean syllabary was a very clumsy, primitive device for recording sounds, and it looks even clumsier in Roman attire. Until better orthographic conventions are arrived at, Mycenean should be kept in separate lexica, in its own syllabary, and not integrated into Greek-alphabet lexica.

And that brings me to a larger issue. This ought to be the last LS revised by piecemeal accretion—agglutinatively, as linguists say. The next time the job has to be done from the root. The present editors acknowledge the need, confessing that “many articles require a more drastic rewriting than can be achieved by the addition, exclusion, or alteration of individual items. Minor changes may in fact only highlight shortcomings in the original articles.” Time and money and restricted staff and an inability to make “a systematic use” of “electronic retrieval facilities” prevented the necessary radical overhaul from being undertaken this time. In making this obvious point, I fear seeming ungrateful for what has here been so meticulously and nobly done. I feel like a phrixopobrontaxastraptes, “a hurler of frightful thunder and lightning,” into an elaionophoinikoparadeisos, an “olive and date orchard.” Both words are lexical newcomers.