Laudator Temporis Acti

W.B. Anderson, "Livy and the Lexica," Classical Quarterly 25.1 (January, 1931) 38-48 (at 38-39):

This, of course, is a trifle, and it is introduced merely because the above meaning of adicio furnishes a suitable text for a comment, which must be made sooner or later, on the work of Forcellini, and particularly of his degenerate descendants Freund, Andrews, Lewis and Short. Forcellini is desperately imperfect, but perhaps deserves more honour for what he accomplished than blame for what he failed to do. The others have less excuse. Let Professor Short serve as their spokesman (Lewis and Short, article adjicio, II.B.): 'Constr. with acc. and inf. (only in Vell. and in the histt, after the Aug. per.).' And yet this construction is so common in Livy that the Thesaurus soon grows tired of citing examples, and contents itself with adding 'alibi persaepe.' There are scholars who, while finding much fault with the work as a whole, praise the treatment of the letter A in Lewis and Short. Let us turn back a few pages and look at another favourite word of Livy, accio. There we find one solitary example from Livy, and the word itself is characterised as 'rare'. Not even Andrews dared to say this; perhaps he had looked at Scheller's lexicon, which describes accio as 'very common.' From these two examples, which are by no means unfair specimens, it may be gathered that the early part of L.-S. is not markedly superior to the later. The student in search of trustworthy information about Livy must certainly not expect to find it in any of the dictionaries named in the first sentence of this paragraph.

See also G.B.A. Fletcher, "More Livy Not in the Lexica," Classical Quarterly 25.3/4 (July-October, 1931) 165-171.

In David Packard's computer-generated Concordance to Livy different forms of the same word (e.g. accio) may be pages, or in some cases volumes, apart, somewhat limiting its usefulness. I wonder if F.R.D. Goodyear had Packard's Concordance in mind when he wrote (The Annals of Tacitus. Books 1-6 Edited with Commentary, Vol. 1: Annals 1.1–54 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972], p. 15, n. 1):

There is much in Gerber-Greef with which one may disagree. Naturally so, for it is a scholarly work and full of controversial opinions. I esteem it the more every time I look at the wretched computerized products which now masquerade as lexica and concordances.