What Will the Glossary Look Like?

As mentioned in our overview of the page-by-page vocabulary apparatus for this project, we have provided roughly 125,000 footnotes containing contextual glosses throughout our two volumes, representing words that occur under 100x in the LXX or under 30x in the Greek NT.

But what about the rest of the words?

Those higher-frequency words (some of which occur thousands of times) are usually quite familiar to Greek readers, and so would simply clutter the page if we put them in the footnotes. Thus, we have consolidated them in a glossary included at the back.

In this post, we will give you a brief overview of this glossary.

What it looks like

Let us start with a sample.

One can see that the glossary is arranged in two-column format, with a handful of pieces of information for each entry.

What it includes

Given that this glossary is not a full-fledged lexicon, we were selective about the kinds of information we included as well as the fullness of the glosses themselves.

For each entry, we begin with the lexical form in bold, followed by the genitive ending and m/f/n (for nouns) or gender endings (for adjectives). We also provide a short categorical description of the word (noun, adj., adv., conj., etc.).

Out to the right, we provide in brackets an estimate of the frequency of the word in the LXX and GNT, respectively. The computation of such numbers depends, of course, on the textual base you’re using and how lemmas are tagged, so it is to be expected that our frequency counts may not always agree 100% with others (e.g., in the Lust-Eynikel-Hauspie lexicon or in Bible software).

The rest of the entry consists of a list of glosses, or translation equivalents, that give a sense for how the world is used (rather than full definitions, as one might find in, say, Muraoka’s lexicon). Even with the glosses provided we had to be selective and focus on the most common. For economy of space, we avoided including representative verse references for a given use of a word, which can generally be found in larger lexicons.

Within the list of glosses, supplemental lexical information is provided in italics and/or brackets (e.g., for substantival uses of adjectives, middle/passive uses of certain verbs, and so on).

Odds and ends

All told, there are roughly 330 words in the glossary.

Rather than customize the glossary for each of the two volumes (which might prove confusing to the reader), we included identical glossaries at the end of each.

The glossary itself, we hope, can become a helpful tool for LXX readers to give their vocabulary memorization a shot in the arm as they begin using the reader’s edition. Most of the words will be familiar to anyone who has studied Greek for NT purposes, though a few words will show up that are very frequent in the LXX but uncommon in the NT.