The origin may be traced to Erwin Preuschen's Vollständiges Griechisch-Deutsches Handwörterbuch zu den Schriften des Neuen Testaments und der übrigen urchristlichen Literatur. Walter Bauer extensively revised this work, as Griechisch-deutsches Wörterbuch zu den Schriften des Neuen Testaments und der übrigen urchristlichen Literatur. The first English edition was published in 1957. It is based upon the fourth German edition of Walter Bauer’s Greek-German lexicon. The project began in the fall of 1949, when F. Wilbur Gingrich was granted a leave of absence from Albright College to work on a new Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament, translating and adapting the work of Bauer in collaboration with Dr. William F. Arndt. The work actually took 5 ½ years. This English edition is often referenced by an abbreviation of the authors - Bauer, Arndt, and Gingrich. The second English edition was published in 1979 with the additional help of Frederick William Danker due to the death of Arndt in 1957. It is based upon based on Bauer’s fifth German edition. This second edition, Bauer-Danker Greek Lexicon of the New Testament, is commonly known as BAGD. The third English edition was published in 2000. It is based upon the sixth German edition, which was published following Bauer's death in 1960, by Kurt Aland, Barbara Aland and Viktor Reichmann. Gingrich died in 1993, leavingDanker to complete the third English edition based on all the prior editions and substantial work of his own. Given the extensive improvements in this edition, it is now known as Bauer–Danker–Arndt–Gingrich or sometimes the Bauer-Danker Lexicon. A notable feature of the third English edition is vastly improved typography. This reflects early adoption of SGML technology. The entire lexicon was converted to SGML in the late 1980s at Dallas Seminary with collaboration from SGML experts interested in the project, and Danker actually did substantial editorial and authorial work in an SGML editing program. This technology permitted much more consistent and flexible typography, as well as information retrieval. A Chinese translation of the lexicon, based on the third English edition, was published in 2009 in Hong Kong by Chinese BibleInternational Limited.
