The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae®: Our Mission and Our Projects
The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG®) is a Special Research Program at the University of California, Irvine. Founded in 1972, the TLG was a pioneering effort to create a large digital corpus of literary texts. Since its inception, the project has collected and digitized Greek texts spanning more than two millennia, from Homer (8th century B.C.) to the fall of Byzantium in A.D. 1453, as well as a substantial number of post-Byzantine texts (16th–20th centuries). Its ultimate goal is to create a comprehensive digital library of Greek literature from antiquity to the present day. TLG research combines traditional methods of philological and literary scholarship with advances in information technology.
In spring 2001, the TLG released its own search engine and made the corpus available online. Today, the Online TLG contains more than 140 million words from over 12,000 works associated with approximately 4,800 authors. The corpus continues to expand and is regularly enhanced with new texts, tools, and features. The full corpus is available to more than 2,000 subscribing institutions and thousands of individual users in 79 countries worldwide. Since 2004, the project has focused exclusively on online dissemination and no longer distributes the corpus on CD-ROM.
A subset of the corpus, the Abridged TLG®, is freely available to the public, along with the project's extensive bibliographical database, the Canon of Greek Authors and Works. The Abridged TLG contains more than 1,000 works by 145 authors and uses the same search engine as the full Online TLG. It provides access to major classical authors and a substantial selection of patristic texts.
As part of its ongoing efforts to lemmatize the Greek corpus and enhance its research capabilities, the TLG has also digitized and integrated several major Greek lexica. These include the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ), Cunliffe's Lexicon of Homeric Greek, Powell's Lexicon to Herodotus, the Lexikon zur byzantinischen Gräzität (LBG), and, more recently, Koumanoudes' Συναγωγή νέων λέξεων and the Historical Dictionary of Modern Greek (ILNE). These resources are integrated into the TLG search environment, allowing users to move between lexical entries and the Greek texts they reference.
Over the years, the TLG has evolved from a searchable collection of Greek texts into a comprehensive digital research environment that integrates textual, lexical, and linguistic resources. In addition to its extensive corpus and digitized lexica, the platform offers lemmatization, morphological analysis, advanced search capabilities, and tools for exploring patterns of language use across authors, genres, and historical periods. Features such as parallel browsing, statistical analysis, and N-gram searches enable scholars to investigate Greek literature in ways that would not be possible through traditional methods alone. The TLG continues to develop new tools and technologies, building on more than five decades of experience in digital humanities while maintaining its commitment to the accuracy, reliability, and scholarly integrity of its textual corpus.
Read more about the history of the TLG.