The same entry is taken over by ps.-
Zonaras. The meaning given in their gloss, however, is not attested in the few surviving independent occurrences of the transmitted headword verb
e)kph/gnusqai (predominantly in
Theophrastus, in reference to plants); almost certainly this is a mistake on the part of the Suda or its immediate source(s).
In any event the headword infinitive should be
e)kplh/gnusqai (sic), as Theodoridis on
Photius,
Lexicon epsilon472 has latterly declared. A variant of the verb used in the gloss,
e)kplh/ttesqai (cf. LSJ s.v.), it occurs in
Thucydides 4.125.1 (on panic striking a Macedonian army in 423 BCE: web address 1); and, probably on the basis of
scholia to that passage, earlier lexicography (
Moeris, citing '
Thucydides';
Hesychius epsilon1629) had presented entries very similar to this one, apart from the
ekpl- headword. (Adler does cite a scholium to
Thucydides 4.125.1 as an original source, but Hude's edition of the
scholia to
Thucydides gives merely 'note
e)kplh/gnusqai'.) Post-Suda -- in the C13/14 --
Thomas Magister,
Ecloga nominum et verborum Atticorum epsilon151.8-10, sets out the matter most fully of all: "
e)plh/gnusqai occurs only in
Thucydides: '[sudden fear], as is apt to strike large armies, unaccountably, with astonishment'. You, though, say
e)plh/ttesqai."