I’ve created this page mainly as a convenient place to keep links to online scans and digital ports of Forcellini’s great Totius Latinitatis Lexicon. But I probably, from time to time, add links to other Latin dictionary resources that I find useful.

Forcellini

What we really mean by “Forcellini” today is the fifth Padua edition (1940), which was published with the title Lexicon totius Latinitatis. The scans linked below are of an unaltered reprint of the 1940 edition that was published in 1965. All six volumes can be consulted at catholica.cz. Vols. 1–4 are also accessible at archive.org. Vols. 5–6 (the Onomasticon) are also accessible at manuscriptorium.com.

An account of the origins and publication history of Forcellini’s Lexicon down to 1940 can be found in a booklet by Giuseppe Bellini (1888–1957): Le cinque edizioni padovane del Lexicon Totius Latinitatis di Egidio Forcellini (Padua: Gregoriana Editrice, 1942), made freely available online by the Biblioteca antica del Seminario di Padova.

The original work of Egidio Forcellini (1688–1768), as subsequently revised and augmented in the third Padua edition by Giuseppe Furlanetto (1775–1848), was further revised by two professors at the Seminario Vescovile: Francesco Corradini (1820–1888) and Giuseppe Perin (1845–1925). Vols. 1–4 were published in instalments between 1864 and 1898, with vols. 1–3 edited by Corradini alone and vol. 4 by Corradini and Perin together:

• vol. 1: A–Cytonium, ed. Corradini (1864–1857)
• vol. 2: D–Koppa, ed. Corradini (1857–1870)
• vol. 3: L–Quum, ed. Corradini (1871–1883)
• vol. 4, T–Zyza, ed. Corradini and Perin (1887–1898)

During most of this period, a rival revision of Forcellini was in progress of publication by a Padua alumnus, Vincenzo de Vit (1811–1892). De Vit’s work was described as follows by Paul Lejay in the (original) Catholic Encyclopedia (vol. 15 [1912], p. 484, archive.org):

De Vit’s idea differed from that of Forcellini and Furlanetto, it being his intention to include in his book all the periods and all the varieties of Latin down to A.D. 568. He likewise gave an exact digest of the authors of the decadence and the Fathers of the Church, and accorded considerable space to inscriptions, which he also treated in special works. His work was a third larger than Furlanetto’s edition, which extension compelled him to leave out proper names. The “Lexicon totius latinitatis” was completed in 1879. De Vit undertook the “Onomasticon”, which he brought down to the beginning of the letter P. Unfortunately no one has undertaken its completion. One of the great merits of the “Lexicon”, apart from its extent, is that it allows the restoration of the exact history of each word according to writers and periods. Very rarely does a text important for meaning escape de Vit’s gleaning. His work will always be useful because it gives all essential information in a comparatively brief form.

Corradini studiously avoided so much as glancing at this edition, lest he should even unintentionally incorporate de Vit’s original research into his own edition.

As Lejay noted, the Onomasticon of de Vit’s edition was left unfinished. A complete account of proper names in Latin was finally achieved by Perin in vols. 5–6 of the Padua fourth edition, which appeared in instalments between 1913 and 1926:

• vol. 5 = Onomasticus, vol. 1: A–Izinon, ed. Perin (1913–1920)
• vol. 6 = Onomasticus, vol. 2: J–Zuzim, ed. Perin (1920–1926)

Before his death in 1925, Perin had also prepared supplementary appendices to the first four volumes of the Lexicon, with a preface. These were revised by two younger (unnamed) professors of the Seminario and first appeared in 1940, in the fifth Padua edition, which was otherwise an “anastatic” (photographic) reprint of the fourth edition. (The anonymous preface to this edition speaks of this printing method as “a remarkable technique from the inventions of recent chemistry”). There are said to have been six of these supplementary appendices, but I have only been able to discover four, all printed at the end of the prefatory material to vol. 1 of the 1940 edition. The anonymous revisers noted that they had incorporated new data from Georg Goetz’s Corpus glossariorum Latinorum, 7 vols. in 8 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1888–1923), from the volumes that had so far appeared in the Thesaurus linguae Latinae, and from the “Lexicon Georgianum.” I assume that the last reference was, not to the one-volume Lexikon der lateinischen Wortformen (1890) of Karl Ernst Georges (1806–1895), but to the revised edition of his Ausführliches lateinisch-deutsches Handwörterbuch, which appeared between 1913 and 1918.