Core Latin and Ancient Greek Vocabularies

Book excerpt: The DCC Core Vocabulary lists represent the 1,000 most common words in Latin and the 500 most common words in ancient Greek. Data for the Latin list comes from 1.7 million words hand analyzed by the Laboratoire d'Analyse Statistique des Langues Anciennes, and 800,000 words hand analyzed by Paul B. Diederich ("The Frequency of Latin Words and Their Endings." Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1939). The frequency rankings are derived from LASLA, and do not take Diederich's counts into consideration. Data for the Greek list comes from subset of the comprehensive Thesaurus Linguae Graecae database (kindly provided by Maria Pantelia), and the corpus of Greek authors at Perseus under PhiloLogic (kindly provided by Helma Dik of the University of Chicago). Definitions were adapted from various sources. This work of data analysis, word selection, and editing was carried out by Chris Francese in 2012¿13, with valuable help from the following: Wilfred Major of Louisiana State University; Eric Casey of Sweet Briar College; Meghan Reedy and Marc Mastangelo, both of Dickinson College; Dickinson students Alice Ettling, James Martin, Meredith Wilson, Derek Frymark, and Qingyu Wang; graduate student Alex Lee of the University of Chicago; and web developer Ryan Burke.