Laudator Temporis Acti

Antilabe is a word not found in the Oxford English Dictionary, but it shows up fairly often in scholarly writing about Greek drama. Antilabe is a transcription of Greek ἀντιλαβή. Liddell-Scott-Jones, s.v. ἀντιλαβή, sense 4:

Gramm., in dramatic dialogue, division of a line between two speakers, Hsch.

In its English (or rather Roman alphabetic) dress it seems to occur first (as antilabé) in a University of Chicago dissertation by John Leonard Hancock, Studies in Stichomythia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1917), p. 11 and passim. The first occurrence I can locate in a scholarly journal is J.D. Denniston, "Pauses in the Tragic Senarius," Classical Quarterly 30.2 (April, 1936) 73-79 (at 73, n. 1). As might be expected, it occurs in German even earlier, e.g. in Gustav Wolff, Sophokles für den Schulgebrauch erklärt, IV: König Oidipus (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1870), p. 101 (on line 1120). In the same book the word in Greek characters occurs on p. 62 (on line 626). In English antilabe is now so common that dictionaries should probably include it.

Labels: lexicography