Using a Lexicon and Reading Aids

Sooner or later you will meet a word this course never taught you. Probably in the first line you read on your own. The skill that matters then is getting from the form on the page (say, ἠλαύνετο) to the right entry in a dictionary (ἐλαύνω) and then to the right sense of that entry. This lesson teaches that skill. Do it by hand first. The online tools are wonderful, and they make lazy readers out of people who never learned to do it without them.

Which dictionary

A dictionary of an ancient language is called a lexicon. For classical Greek in English, nearly everything goes back to one family, started by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott at Oxford in 1843.

The edition dates were checked against the publisher's page, the Cambridge University announcement of 2021 and the reference entries listed in the sources. LSJ's ninth edition was revised by Henry Stuart Jones with Roderick McKenzie, and Oxford University Press still sells it with the 1996 Revised Supplement edited by P. G. W. Glare. The Middle Liddell and LSJ are both free online, which brings us to the tools. But first, how to read an entry.

How an entry is built

Every Greek lexicon follows the same plan. Learn the plan once and you can read any of them.

Nouns

A noun entry gives the nominative singular, then the genitive singular (often just its ending), then the article to show gender. Lesson 14 explained why the genitive matters: for third declension nouns it is the only way to find the stem.

Adjectives

An adjective entry gives the masculine nominative, then the feminine and neuter endings. ἀγαθός, ή, όν is a 2-1-2 adjective (lesson 10). δίκαιος, α, ον has α in the feminine because of the ι before it. An entry like ἄδικος, ον, with only two forms, means the masculine form serves for the feminine too: ἡ ἄδικος γυνή.

Verbs

A verb is listed under the first person singular present indicative active: λύω, γράφω, πέμπω. Deponents (lesson 9) are listed in the middle: βούλομαι, ἔρχομαι. Contract verbs are listed uncontracted, so you look up ποιέω, not ποιῶ, and τιμάω, not τιμῶ. A few verbs that have no present in use are listed under the form that exists: οἶδα, "I know," is a perfect (lesson 15).

After the lemma, the entry lists the verb's other principal parts, especially any that are irregular, often with the authors who use each form. Then come the senses, numbered with Roman numerals, capital letters and Arabic numerals, from the oldest or most basic meaning to the derived ones. Each sense has citations: abbreviated references to passages that show it.

The six principal parts

Lessons 12 to 15 built up the verb system one tense at a time. Here it is all at once. A regular Greek verb has six principal parts, and every form of the verb comes from one of them.

Say them as a chant: λύω, λύσω, ἔλυσα, λέλυκα, λέλυμαι, ἐλύθην [LÜ-ō, LÜ-sō, E-lü-sa, LE-lü-ka, LE-lü-mai, e-LÜ-thēn]. Students have been chanting exactly this for a couple of centuries. It works.

λύω is perfectly regular, which is why every textbook uses it. Many of the commonest verbs are not. Here are a few, with their principal parts as the Dickinson College Commentaries Greek Core Vocabulary lists them. A dash means the form is not in normal use.

Look at λέγω. Its future, aorist and perfect come from different roots altogether. A reader who meets εἴρηκα and has never learned λέγω's principal parts will search under εἰρ- and find nothing useful. Lesson 22 gives ten such verbs to memorize. For ὁράω, the DCC list gives the first four and the sixth; the two perfect middle forms are added here and were checked with the Morpheus parser. For λέγω, φέρω and λαμβάνω, all six parts are as DCC lists them; DCC gives ἔρχομαι only four.

From the page to the lemma

The form you see in a text is almost never the lemma. Here is the method, in the order that usually works.

1. Take off the ending. Is it a noun or adjective ending (-ου, -ῳ, -ας, -οις, -ων) or a verb ending (-ει, -ομεν, -σαν, -ται, -θη)? Lessons 5 to 18 gave you the sets.
2. Take off the augment. An initial ἐ- on a past tense indicative is probably a syllabic augment. An initial η- might be a lengthened α or ε (temporal augment, lesson 12): ἤκουσα comes from ἀκούω. An initial ω- might be a lengthened ο.
3. Take off reduplication. λε-λυκ-, πε-πομφ- (lesson 15).
4. Undo tense signs. -σ- marks the future and first aorist, -κ- the perfect, -θη- the aorist passive. A ψ may be π, β or φ plus σ; a ξ may be κ, γ or χ plus σ (lesson 12).
5. Look for a prefix. Compound verbs put the augment after the prefix (lesson 12): παρ-ε-βοήθει is παρά + ἐ- + βοηθέω. Look up the whole compound first, παραβοηθέω; if it is not listed, look up the simple verb.
6. Check irregulars. If nothing fits, the word may come from one of the irregular verbs. Many lexicons list irregular forms as their own short entries pointing to the lemma ("εἶπον, aor. of λέγω").

The free tools

All of these were checked in October 2026. Websites change, so if a description here does not match what you see, trust the site's own help page.

A 2019 review for the Society for Classical Studies praised the Scaife Viewer's clean layout and click-to-parse, and noted rough edges, including side-by-side translations that do not always line up and no critical apparatus (the notes on manuscript variants). Treat the translation pane as a check, not a crutch.

Parsers list possibilities, not answers

Feed βοώντων to a parser and it will report several analyses: present participle, genitive plural, masculine or neuter; present imperative, third plural; and even an unrelated future participle of a different verb. The program does not read the sentence. You do. In the Reading below, βοώντων follows ἀκούουσι, and ἀκούω takes the genitive of the person heard, so it is the participle: "they hear the soldiers shouting." The imperative "let them shout" makes no sense there.