From the Suda to the South Seas — seven text sources and twenty-six dictionaries
3 November 2026 · Nabu news
A single development window brings the library to 2,629,265 documents / 121,743,954 passages across 301 live sources (census 3 November 2026) — thirty-two sources wired in one window, and the dictionary layer past four million entries (4,203,984).
Byzantium answers in English. The complete English translation of the Suda — the 10th-century Byzantine lexicon-encyclopedia, 31,341 entries keyed by Adler number with translators’ notes and vetting history — joins the shelves beside the held First1K Greek text, from the Suda On Line’s own export. Beside it, the Patristic Text Archive brings 113 open critical editions of early Christian Greek: Severian of Gabala and the Pseudo-Chrysostom corpus, Athanasius and the documents of the Arian controversy, Eusebius, Origen, Hippolytus, each edition carrying its composition date and places onto the library’s axes.
Eighteen thousand Eastern Christian manuscripts, catalogued. The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library’s Reading Room dataset lands as a manuscript catalogue source: 18,892 Syriac and Ethiopic manuscripts, prints and archival objects — shelf marks, dated parts, origins, scripts, contents — with 11,196 incipits in Syriac, Ge’ez, Amharic and Arabic Garshuni as searchable passages, every record dated by the catalogue’s own envelope and placed by its origin, never its holding repository.
The Pāḷi canon with its apparatus. The Sixth Buddhist Council Tipiṭaka in the Yangon romanised edition arrives whole: 118 volumes — canon, commentary and subcommentary — 89,512 paragraphs, with the printed footnote apparatus parsed per paragraph: 73,431 variant readings with their witness sigla. The Ṭīkā layer and the apparatus are new to the library. With it comes the Digital Pāḷi Dictionary (89,763 entries), so the canon and its lookup layer land in the same window.
The Ming examination hall. 312 printed records of the Ming civil-service examinations, 1371–1684, from the Tianyige collection in Ningbo — examiners, the questions of the three sessions, graduate rosters, model answers with the examiners’ comments — 38,711 pages of machine-read text (uncorrected OCR, declared as such), every record dated by its reign era and the provincial records placed by province.
The Pacific opens. The library’s first Oceanic and Micronesian running text: the 1868 Hawaiian Bible in its period spelling, the American Bible Society’s Chamorro Gospels and the 1922 Pohnpeian New Testament — 100 books / 48,762 verses. Beside them, thirteen Pacific mission prints enter the local library as scanned editions: Grey’s Ko Nga Moteatea of 1853, Māori, Samoan, Tongan, Rarotongan, Fijian and Tahitian Bibles of 1838–1868, and Williams’ Māori dictionary — the Google-digitized prints with their page text, the two image-only scans catalogued as reference artifacts.
The dictionary wave. Twenty-six dictionary shelves in one window: Söderwall’s medieval Swedish dictionary with its supplement and Schlyter’s glossary to the old Swedish laws (51,811 entries, keyed to the held fornsvenska corpus), Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française (78,483 articles whose HISTORIQUE sections quote Old and Middle French century by century), the Mahan Kosh — Bhai Kahan Singh Nabha’s 1930 encyclopedic dictionary of the Gurbani vocabulary, 64,218 Gurmukhi entries for the held Sikh scripture — and twenty-two Wiktionary extracts closing long-standing lookup gaps: Middle English for the held Corpus of Middle English, Old Norse, Gothic, Old and Middle French, Scots, Syriac, Aramaic, Breton, Middle Dutch, Middle High German, Old Spanish, Old Swedish, Old Occitan and more, each with its etymon and descendant trees.
As always, the numbers above are the generated census of the live catalog, not hand-kept claims.