Dictionary of Classical Hebrew completed

CONGRATULATIONS to David Clines and his University of Sheffield team:

Sheffield's dictionary triumph

By Simon Rocker, January 19, 2012 (Jewish Chronicle)

What has been billed as the first Dictionary of Classical Hebrew has been completed by a team of scholars based at Sheffield University.

"The only dictionaries there have been are of biblical Hebrew," explained the editor of the eight-volume set, David Clines, emeritus professor of biblical studies at Sheffield. "They didn't include the Dead Sea Scrolls or other Hebrew inscriptions that we have now."

The new publication contains 12,628 words, by Professor Clines's calculation, over 4,200 more than previous biblical dictionaries.

Its distinctive feature is that it cites every instance of a word - with the exception of a few common words - used in more than half a million biblical and other texts, explaining the different usages.

[...]

If only there actually were half a million texts in Classical Hebrew. I'm guessing the original press release or whatever said that the total corpus of Classical Hebrew consists of about half a million words, which sounds about right.