The Greek language has a notably long tradition of linguistic prescriptivism. This tendency is embodied in classical (linguistic) Atticism, a movement that sought to recapture the language of high Attic literature, particularly its vocabulary, and reached its peak at the end of the Second Sophistic (c. II–III CE). This movement coincided with the early stages of diglossia in Greek, a tendency that would find its ultimate development in the ideological struggle between the katharevousa (‘purifying’) and demotic (‘popular’) variants of the language during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Consequently, Greek lexicography has been indelibly marked by an internal struggle, a kind of cognitive dissonance, which has sometimes prevented editors of Modern Greek dictionaries from fully adopting modern, more rigorous lexicographical principles that seek to describe Greek words in more objective, less ideological terms.
After a brief outline of the socio-political and historical contexts from which Modern Greek lexicography emerged during the last century or so, a link will be made between the Atticistic lexica of the postclassical period and a purifying, prescriptivising trend that has remained (or in some cases has been intentionally revived) right up until the present. It will be shown that the historical and cultural prestige of classical, Attic Greek continues to weigh heavily upon the modern Greek consciousness.