Announcing the Perseus Greek and Latin Vocabulary Tool

28 August 2001

Did you ever wonder how many words Virgil uses in the Aeneid? Ever think about whether Aeschylus or Sophocles has a bigger vocabulary? How about what words someone needs to know to read Caesar or Xenophon?

With the new Perseus Greek and Latin Vocabulary Tool you can answer these questions. Look for yourself:

• Words in the Aeneid
• Vocabulary summary for all the works of Aeschylus
• Most important words in Caesar's Gallic War

The Vocabulary Tool builds word lists for a text, part of a text (for example, one book of the Iliad), or a group of texts (for example, the poems of Catullus and Cicero's Pro Caelio). You can specify how many words you want and how to sort them. The Key Term Score feature lets you request only the "important" words, those that appear more often in the text you've chosen than in other texts in the Perseus collection. For more details, including some ways the Vocabulary Tool can help with your reading, see the help text.

You'll find a link to the Vocabulary Tool in the sidebar when you are reading any Greek or Latin text, between the language tools and the table of contents. You can also get to the Vocabulary Tool from the Tools menu, always available from the "Tools" link at the top of your screen.

Please report any problems to the Perseus webmaster.