comments:
My favourite "hand reference" dictionary is William Smith, A Smaller Latin-English Dictionary, 3rd ed., rev. J. F. Lockwood (1933, many reprints). I actually have three copies: one in my bag for consultation on the subway or in the park, one on my desk at work, and one by my armchair at home. You can read a pdf scan of the preface to the 1933 edition here. And to get an idea of the the kind of information it gives, you could look at the entry for the word magnus in the following three images: magnus 1 magnus 2 magnus 3 I like the old hardcover editions, which can be found via the Advanced Book Exchange. But it's also available new in paperback reprint as the Chambers-Murray Latin-English Dictionary > amazon.com. The content is nearly a century old, so naturally there are a few details that could benefit from updating. (For example, there are a few words about which scholarly opinion on "hidden quantity" has changed since 1933.) But they're the kind of thing you can do with a pencil. As a compact dictionary that still manages to cram in useful illustrative quotations from Classical authors, Smith's Smaller hasn't had many serious competitors since it first appeared. PS. Dictionaries can be addictive, and if you read Latin texts across a wide chronological and historical period (as medievalists like me tend to do), you can never really have enough. I've got about twenty Latin dictionaries on my shelves. But Smith's Smaller is the one I've found most useful in a portable size.