The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae and Other Dictionaries
Thesaurus Linguae Latinae: The TLL is an enormous lexicographical project that documents all attestations of every Latin word up to about 600 AD. De Gruyter hosts the digital database edition (which you can only access through an institutional subscription—check your library’s website for access), but there are open-access PDFs now available of all published volumes, not including the newest fascicles.
TLL Index: The Index for the Thesaurus catalogs all the texts, authors, and editions cited in the TLL itself. Its abbreviations of Latin texts and authors provide helpful examples for unambiguously citing every work of Latin literature in the dictionary. I’ve written a little more about using the index in a separate blog post.
Johann Manninger’s Neulateinische Wortliste: My former colleague (now retired) at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae has compiled—and continues to compile?—a TLL-style lexicon of post-Petrarch Latin words, including attestations of words like “hahaha” and “pyrotechnia.” The grid of letters in the upper-left corner is the navigation system for the lemmata/headwords in the lexicon.
Logeion: Some people at UChicago have put together this mega-dictionary site Logeion, and it’s much more useful than Perseus (at least I have found) for just looking up words. You get a range of dictionaries—not just LSJ and Lewis and Short—for your search queries.
Guide to an Apparatus Criticus This helpful document, compiled by Karl Maurer at the University of Dallas, shows the common symbols and Latin abbreviations you’ll find in the “app crit” at the bottom of scholarly editions of Greek or Latin texts (such as an OCT or Teubner edition).
Text Corpora and Other Digital Editions
Diogenes: Diogenes is a powerful tool for searching through corpora of classical texts. It does not come with the TLG or the PHI, but you can maybe find the data files from someone at your university. Ask around your classics department. As of the version 4, Diogenes also integrates with the open-access PDFs of the TLL, which I describe in this blog entry—a great way to tie together these various resources in one place.
PHI On-Line: You can access the PHI on-line if you cannot get a copy of the texts from your university.
Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum: The American lexicographer at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae has compiled a web interface for searching Georg Goetz’s Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum. It’s a great way to find equivalents—as understood historically—for Greek and Latin terms.
Corpus Medicorum Graecorum / Latinorum: The Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften has made available complete scans of edited medical texts from both Greek and Latin authors.
Loebolus: The Duke librarian Ryan Baumann has collected a bunch of PDFs of old Loeb editions. Handy if you want to download a translation of something for reference.
Writing and Fonts
Columbia University LaTeX Dissertation Template: I learned how to use LaTeX in undergraduate math classes, and I prefer it to Microsoft Word and other word processors. Since Columbia (and most universities) have specific requirements about the formatting of dissertations, I had to tweak my regular template to account for (e.g.) spacing in footnotes and numbering conventions. If you’re interested in using LaTeX to write your dissertation, you may find the template at the above link helpful.
“How to Write a Paper for Contemporary Civilization”: While a graduate student at Columbia, I wrote up some advice that had proven helpful to my students in Contemporary Civilization. Although I had that particular class in mind as I wrote this document, I imagine that my suggestions are applicable to courses in a wide range of humanities disciplines: certainly classics and philosophy, but even literature.
Linux Libertine Font: Writing papers for publication or even for classics coursework often involves typing unusual characters (for example, polytonic Greek), and some fonts render these characters improperly. I’ve found a number of fonts that both render Greek very well and also look nice generally. I often use Linux Libertine. Gentium is a solid alternative. So is Cardo.
Pandoc: Different writers, readers, and publishers demand different file formats. Pandoc is a tool that allows for easy conversions among various document types: .docx, PDFs, HTML, everything. It’s particularly useful if you use LaTeX or any other kind of mark-up language for your writing.
Latin Composition
David Morgan’s Lexicum Anglum et Latinum: The late David Morgan, a real expert in Latin composition and modern Latin vocabulary, assembled this amazing resource of contemporary language rendered into Latin.
Smith’s English-Latin Dictionary: A bit dated, but a very comprehensive dictionary of Latin equivalents for English words and phrases. Smith’s has a great deal of classical examples, too, so you can look back to idioms and contexts easily.