Diminishing Returns and New Challenges

This chapter considers the creation of a few works of intermediate character that combine the full and exact detail typical of the special lexica with coverage of a wider band of literature. An example is the vision of a Poetic Lexicon of Classical Greek, embracing epic, elegy, iambus, lyric, philosophical poetry, drama, and verse inscriptions of the pre-Alexandrian centuries. The chapter presents a few specimen entries: an interjection, an adjective, a verb, and a noun. The layout of the entries will remind the reader of Liddell and Scott (LSJ), and the model of LSJ has been followed in many respects. One difference is that where there is anything to say about etymologies it is put at the beginning.