Explanatory dictionaries composed entirely of aphorisms appeared a long time ago. The most famous is Leonard Louis Levinson's Dictionary of Unreliable Definitions (1966); it was he who served as the closest model for Aphoristikon. Aphoristikon, however, is by no means a translation of Levinson's dictionary. The list of sources I used includes several hundred names; the most important of these are listed at the end of the book. Like Levinson and his successors, the author sometimes allowed himself to slightly modify the original aphorism so that the keyword came first.