Henry George Liddell

born Feb. 6, 1811, Bishop Auckland, County Durham, Eng.
died Jan. 18, 1898, Ascot, Berkshire

British lexicographer and co-editor of the standard Greek– English Lexicon (1843; 8th ed., 1897; revised by H.S. Jones and others, 1940; abridged, 1957; intermediate, 1959). In 1834 he and a fellow student at Oxford, Robert Scott, began preparing the Lexicon, basing their work on the Greek–German lexicon of Francis Passow, professor at the University of Breslau.

A tutor at Balliol College, Oxford (1836–45), Liddell was ordained in the Church of England (1838) and in 1846 was appointed domestic chaplain to Prince Albert. He was headmaster of Westminster School prior to serving as Dean of Christ Church, Oxford (1856–91). He devoted much of his spare time to revising and enlarging the Lexicon. He also wrote a History of Ancient Rome, 2 vol. (1855), abridged in 1871 under the title The Student's Rome: A History of Rome from the Earliest Times to the Establishment of the Empire. It was for Liddell's daughter Alice that Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland.

Preface 1925

More than eighty years have passed since the first edition of the famous Lexicon upon which the present work is based was published by the Clarendon Press. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott--the latter a Craven and Ireland Scholar--were both placed in the First Class in the Oxford list of 1833, both having been born in 1811. In 1835 Scott became a Fellow of Balliol and in the following year Liddell was elected to a Studentship of Christ Church. It appears that Mr. Talboys, an Oxford bookseller and publisher, first approached Scott with a proposal that a Greek-English Lexicon, based on that of Franz Passow, should be compiled, and that Scott made his acceptance conditional on the consent of Liddell to join in the work; at any rate, it was Talboys who first undertook the publication, which was taken over after his retirement by the Clarendon Press. There is, however, some ground for thinking that William Sewell, who had been an examiner in the Schools of 1833, suggested the idea to Liddell and Scott; and Liddell mentions in his correspondence the encouragement which the project received from Dean Gaisford.