The Oxford Classical Dictionary
The Oxford Classical Dictionary ( OCD ) is (up to and including the 4th edition) a one-volume specialist dictionary of classical studies .
The entries are usually kept relatively brief, but written by proven experts. The OCD (in the 4th edition) is relatively up-to-date, as a rule further literature is also listed. The OCD enjoys an excellent international reputation and covers almost the entire spectrum of ancient history: from political history to the history of religion and mythological figures. However, in some cases there are clear blind spots in the area of late antiquity , which is hardly taken into account. This loophole has been closed by the Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity since March 2018 . The 5th edition of the OCD (see below), which only appears online, also gives more space to late antiquity.
The first edition of the OCD (around 1000 pages) was published in 1949, followed by a revised edition in 1970, edited by Nicholas GL Hammond and Howard Hayes Scullard . The 3rd edition was published in 1996 by Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth, and the volume has grown to over 1,600 pages. This edition was published in 2003 in a slightly revised version. The 4th edition appeared in 2012. Several articles have been revised and updated in this, and some new lemmas have been added.
The 3rd edition was also published on CD-ROM and is available in a form that is significantly stripped down and modified in terms of content (but also significantly cheaper) as The Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization . A 2nd edition of the Companion was published in 2014 based on the new 4th edition of the Dictionary . Several articles and the specific references for the individual chapters have been removed, but all other articles have been retained in their original form; there were also 50 new articles that are not in the dictionary .
Oxford Classical Dictionary Online
The 5th edition, which is currently under construction, will be a fully digital version in which multimedia elements will also be integrated. The scope and number of lemmas are much larger than in the printed editions. Several articles are available in full length for free. The authors should be given the opportunity to update their articles regularly. Currently (March 2020) Tim Whitmarsh is the Editor-in-Chief.
expenditure
- The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Edited by Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth. 4th edition. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2012, ISBN 978-0-19-954556-8 .