William Smith (lexicographer)

• 1. Introduction

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  William Smith spent his spare hours as a young legal clerk teaching himself ancient Greek and Latin from scratch. By the time he walked into University College London, he had never had formal instruction in either language. He won both the Greek and Latin prizes anyway. That self-directed determination would eventually reshape how students across Britain encountered the classical world. How did a Nonconformist boy from Enfield, originally pointed toward the church and then steered into law, end up producing some of the most enduring reference works the English language has ever seen? And what drove him to keep building, dictionary after dictionary, for more than five decades?

• 2. An Unlikely Scholar

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  Smith was born on the 20th of May 1813 in Enfield, the son of Nonconformist parents. His early schooling took place at the Madras House in Hackney, run by a teacher named John Allen. His family had a theological career in mind for him, but that path did not hold. He was articled to a solicitor instead, entering Gray's Inn in 1830. It was in whatever hours he could find between legal duties that he quietly worked through classical texts. When his legal studies ended, he took a post at University College School and began writing on classical subjects. The shift from law clerk to scholar happened without fanfare, driven entirely by his own appetite for the work.

• 3. Building the Classical Reference Shelf

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  Smith's first major lexicographical project, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, appeared in 1842. He wrote the greater part of it himself. Seven years later came the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, and in 1854 a parallel volume on geography followed, with some of the leading scholars of the day contributing to the task. Each volume was conceived as a companion to the others, a coherent architecture of classical knowledge rather than a single stand-alone reference. The Latin-English Dictionary he completed in 1855 ran to 1,214 pages and drew on the earlier works of Forcellini and Freund. What made it unusual for its time was its scope: it reached beyond what scholars then considered classical Latin, defined roughly as the period from 100 BCE to 100 CE, and included entries absent from rival dictionaries, among them Lewis and Short. Murray was the publisher of this volume after Smith's original publishing partner ran into difficulties. The dictionary was reissued periodically across the following 35 years.

• 4. Reforming the Classroom

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  Smith published the first of his school dictionaries in 1850. In 1853 he launched the Principia series, a set of textbooks that marked a genuine shift in how Greek and Latin were taught in British schools. The series did not simply translate texts; it rethought the pedagogy. Around the same time, he began the Student's Manuals covering history and literature. The English literature volume went through thirteen editions. Smith himself wrote the volume on Greek history. From 1853 to 1869 he served as classical examiner to the University of London, a role that placed him at the centre of how classical learning was tested and valued nationally. When he retired from that post he joined the Senate of the University. He also sat on the committee examining copyright questions and served for several years as registrar of the Royal Literary Fund.

• 5. The Ecclesiastical Turn

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  Some of Smith's most substantial later work moved away from the Greco-Roman world entirely. The Dictionary of the Bible appeared across the years 1860 to 1865. Then came the Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, published between 1875 and 1880 in collaboration with Archdeacon Samuel Cheetham. The Dictionary of Christian Biography followed in 1877 to 1887, this time jointly produced with Henry Wace. These volumes brought to religious scholarship the same systematic ambition Smith had applied to classical antiquity. The Atlas he edited, on which Sir George Grove collaborated, appeared in 1875. He also edited Gibbon's history with the notes of Guizot and Milman in 1854 to 1855. In 1867 he took on the editorship of the Quarterly Review and held that post until his death.

• 6. Honours and Legacy

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  The University of Oxford and Trinity College Dublin both named Smith a DCL. A knighthood was conferred on him in 1892, a year before his death. He died on the 7th of October 1893 in London and is buried in a family grave on the eastern side of Highgate Cemetery. The 1,214-page Latin-English Dictionary, reissued periodically for 35 years after its first appearance in 1855, outlasted many rivals precisely because it drew on sources other dictionaries of the period had not incorporated.