About the TLG®

The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG®) is a research center at the University of California, Irvine. It is administered by a Director who reports to the UCI Vice Chancellor for Research.

Founded in 1972 the TLG represents the first effort in the Humanities to produce a large digital corpus of literary texts. Since its inception the project has collected and digitized most texts written in Greek from Homer (8 c. B.C.) to the fall of Byzantium in AD 1453 and beyond. Its goal is to create a comprehensive digital library of Greek literature from antiquity to the present era. TLG research activities combine the traditional methodologies of philological and literary study with the most advanced features of information technology. TLG texts became available to the scholarly community first on magnetic tapes (in the mid 1970s) and later in CD ROM format. CD ROMs A (1985), C (1988) and D (1992) were produced with technical support from the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI). TLG E (2000) was produced entirely in-house by the TLG team under the direction of Maria Pantelia following the migration of the corpus from the Ibycus system to the Unix environment.

In spring 2001 the TLG-team developed its own search engine and made the corpus available online. Today the Online TLG contains more than 105 million words from over 10,000 works associated with 4,000 authors and is constantly updated and improved with new features and texts. The full corpus is available to more than 2,000 subscribing institutions and thousands of individuals in 58 countries worldwide. As of 2004, the project has been focusing its resources on web dissemination and is no longer licensing the corpus in CD ROM format.

A subcorpus (Abridged TLG) together with the extensive bibliographical database developed by the TLG (Canon of Greek Authors and Works) is open to the public. The Abridged version contains 900 Greek works from 67 authors and uses the same search engine as the full Online TLG version. It provides access to the most important classical authors and a large number of patristic texts.

Read more about the history of the TLG.