Brill’s Etymological Dictionary of Greek by Robert Beekes has been sitting quietly on prepublication page at Logos.com for about two and a half years now. It languished for some time, particularly because it was priced, as all Brill books are, exorbitantly high. That seems to have changed recently.

It’s now on pre-order for $104.

rather than, I can’t remember, $299? The original pre-order price was something like that. We have left the realm of astronomically unaffordable and have arrived in the realm of a great deal for 1,808 pages of Greek and proto-Indo-European lexicography.

Etymological dictionaries are a special breed, of course. The mode of operation for their usage diverges from a standard lexicon like BDAG or LSJM. The coverage is more specific to words with a longer history and you crack them open for the purposes of research rather than reading or interpretation of texts. Nevertheless, Beekes’ etymological dictionary is an essential for any serious linguistic research on Greek diachronically or proto-Indo-European more generally.

$104 for a digital version of Beekes? I’m in—especially since I don’t go for using print lexicons any more. Digital is better. Now we just need Peeters to realize this so we can have digital edition of Muraoka’s LXX lexicon, too.

In the meantime, all I can say is: “Well done Brill & Logos.”