Hesychius of Alexandria
4th/5th century
Coptic Church
Egypt

Hesychius was an Alexandrian Greek lexicographer probably of the fourth or fifth century. Little is known about his background. He is sometimes described in later sources as a pagan. To the world of scholarship, he is known solely through his monumental Greek dictionary, in which he dealt with the varied Greek dialects and incorporated a vocabulary of patristic letters, notably that of Saint Cyril I, patriarch of Alexandria. However, his work is based on the second-century Greek dictionary of Diogenianus of Heraclea as well as the work of a number of other Greek lexicographers. His compilation has survived in a mutilated fifteenth-century manuscript preserved at Venice (National Marean Library, no. 622) and edited by J. Alberti in the eighteenth century and M. Schmidt in the nineteenth century.

Aziz S. Atiya