By Theophilus D. Hall, William Smith

Description

Smith's English-Latin Dictionary is an invaluable resource for students and teachers who are composing Latin verse and prose. It offers what smaller and less comprehensive dictionaries cannot — semantic range, depth, and precision. Each entry is composed of an English word, its corresponding Latin equivalents, and examples drawn from a full range of classical writers. The Index of Proper Names contains the Latin forms of names of thousands of persons, places, and geographical features from Greco-Roman history and mythology, as well as the Judeo-Christian Bible.

This reprint edition of Smith and Hall's A Copious and Critical English-Latin Dictionary (1871) includes the original Preface, Entries, and Index of Proper Names. New to the Bolchazy-Carducci edition is a Foreword by Dirk Sacre which places Smith and Hall's dictionary in its historical and pedagogical context.The Bolchazy-Carducci reprint edition also features a new, enlarged, easier-to-read format.

From the Foreword:

Sir William Smith's and Theophilus D. Hall's Copious and Critical English-Latin Dictionary is one of these monuments of nineteenth-century pedagogy and learning that has no counterpart in late twentieth-century tools for students writing in Latin. It is conspicuous for its critical attitude towards predecessors, the wealth of terms included, the thoughtful investigation of the different shades of meaning of both Latin and English words-the authors avoided the pitfalls of superficial similarity between English and Latin words in proposing equivalent translations-, the number of examples of words and expressions adduced, and the specification of the authors from which the various words and idioms were taken. . . .Works like this invite us to browse through them, searching for the exact equivalent of an English word or for a wealth of unexpected possibilities of expression, help us to write that one Latin sentence an ancient writer would have believed to have been written by a fellow countryman, and guide us to grasp better and better the Latin idiom and the Roman way of thinking.

It is, in short, an indispensable reference tool for ascertaining authentic Roman expression for English words.

Comments and Reviews

Perhaps the most important volume Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers issued this past year is a reprint of Smith's English-Latin Dictionary. (To be precise, this is a reprint of the 1871 American edition of Sir William Smith's and Theophilus Hall's A Copious and Critical English-Latin Dictionary.) Why is an English-Latin dictionary so valuable? The answer is simple. Speaking as a former teacher of Latin, I have to say that the most important-and most neglected-part of Latin instruction is writing in Latin. At the introductory level, this means that Latin vocabulary (indeed, the vocabulary of any foreign language) should be learned from English to Latin. Any fool, without a day's instruction, might guess that aqua means "water," but only a Latin student, when asked the Latin word for water, can answer: "aqua, aquae, feminine."

At higher levels, the problem becomes one of Latin composition, and since even good students cannot remember everything and are unlikely to know, for example, the words for (opening the book at random to pp. 340-41) "gizzard," "glare," "glass," or "gleam," he (more likely she, these days) needs to be able to consult a good English-Latin dictionary. In my previous life as a Latin teacher, I never actually owned a copy of Smith and had to use it in the library. Now, no first-year Latin teacher has an excuse for not owning it.

—Dr. Thomas Fleming
copyright Chronicles, July 2002 pg. 36

In researching and writing my novels about ancient Rome, I have occasion to consult almost daily the venerable 19th-century reference works of the great William Smith, including his remarkable English-Latin Dictionary (originally published as A Copious and Critical English-Latin Dictionary).

—Steven Saylor

Smith's English–Latin Dictionary...is a monument all in itself and will find its place in our future classroom experiences...

—Reginald Foster
Teresianum