Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) is the most comprehensive existing database of Greek texts; it contains virtually all Greek texts surviving from the period between Homer (8th century B.C.E.) and 600 C.E., and the majority of surviving works up to the fall of Byzantium in 1453 C.E. Use the TLG to browse texts in Greek, search for words and phrases within texts, search for similar phrases across texts, and view word statistics for all centuries and authors.
Most sections of TLG are open access but users must create a free profile on the site to access the full corpus of data.
To view or input Greek, you need a Unicode polytonic Greek font on your computer. Most Macs come with the Unicode fonts already installed so you just need to configure it once:
Navigating the TLG
For big-picture searches concerning Greek texts, select the Canon Search tab
For small, specific searches of words and phrases within texts, select the Text Search tab
For guidance choosing which search tab to use and how to navigate within it, use this flowchart
To browse two texts side-by-side, select Browse > Parallel Browsing
For lexographical information of Greek words, select Lexica
To search for and compare similar phrases across texts, select N-Grams
To investigate the frequency and occurrence of a certain word or all words in a certain time period, select Statistics
To use pre-made vocabulary flashcards for any text within the corpus, select Vocabulary Tools
Select the save icon to save search results to your account
Select the question mark and lightbulb icons to view help pages
Once you’ve selected certain works/authors by checking their boxes, you can then select “Go to Text Search” to search for text within your selections
Select the save icon to save your search results, which you can later find in the “My Account” tab.
Simple Search: searches for one word at a time. The difference between Word Index, Lemma, and Textual Searches is in how they search the corpus:
Word Index Search: searches the form you entered
Use if you know the one form you want to search for
Faster than Textual Search since it searches for the form, not the text
Ignores accents and punctuation (unless “Exact Match” is checked)
Wildcard option: allows you to make indeterminable searches.
Lemma Search: searches for all forms or certain forms of a lemma
A lemma is the dictionary entry of a word
Use if you want to search for multiple, particular forms of a word
If “Substring Match” is checked, TLG will search for all compound forms of the lemma
Once you search for a lemma, you can specify which forms of the lemma you want to view by choosing to display search results by “grammar” 
Textual Search: searches the corpus for a particular string of characters
Most useful if you want to search for a root, phrase, or beta code
Can be slower since it searches each line of text in the whole corpus
Ignores accents and punctuation (unless “Exact Match” is checked)
Proximity Search: searches for up to 3 words or lemmata in proximity of each other
Can do a Word Index, Lemma, or Textual Search
Can specify how far apart the words are
Select the save icon to save your search results, which you can later find in the “My Account” tab
Beta codes indicate the format of the written text and correspond to brackets, written font size, some punctuation, underlines, etc.
Option to view the text’s N-Grams (either by lemma or word form), which then shows other texts where these N-Grams occur
Links to Perseus’ English translation and word statistics
Select any word to reveal its lemma and morphological analysis
Parallel Browsing: browse two texts side-by-side
Use to compare two texts
Option to highlight similar phrases between texts
Mechanism for identifying common phrases between texts
What are N-Grams?
Overlapping sequences of content words in text; “intertextual phrase matching” that is based on lemmata, not word forms
Word order and meaningless particles are ignored
Select source text and target text and navigate through similar phrases
Word data for all dates, authors, and lemmata
Use to investigate frequency and occurrence of words at different times and by different authors
Can also use to determine which words were over- or under-represented by certain authors
Provides interactive graphs for most information
Search for lemmata in different lexicons
Use to get lexicographical info on a certain word
Shows geographic distribution and word statistics
Provides a list of words/lemmata in author or a certain work
This work by the Reed College Library is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY Attribution 4.0 International License.
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