The entirety of Hesychius’s lexicon survives through a single, heavily corrupted fifteenth-century manuscript.

The sole surviving witness of Hesychius’s work is the codex Marcianus Graecus 622, dating to the fifteenth century and preserved in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice. This manuscript represents a highly abridged, interpolated, and corrupted version of the original fifth-century text. The Venetian editor Marcus Musurus first printed this text in 1514, introducing further modifications. Consequently, modern philologists must employ rigorous conjectural emendation to reconstruct the original Hellenistic and Imperial lexical entries.