Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary

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Historical Thesaurus of English
Web address www.historicalthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk
Commercial? No
Type of site
Academic
Registration None
Content licence
Free for personal and non-commercial research[1]
Owner University of Glasgow
Created by Marc Alexander and Christian Kay[2]
Editor Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, and Irené Wotherspoon (editors)
Current status Version 4.2, since September, 2014[3]
Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary : with additional material from "A Thesaurus of Old English"
Printed boxed set
Print edition of version 1.0 of the Historical Thesaurus of English[3]
Author Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, and Irené Wotherspoon (editors)
Working title Historical Thesaurus of English
Country Great Britain
Language English
Subject History of the English language
Genre Thesauri
Published 2009 (Oxford University Press)
Pages 4,448
Awards Scottish Research Book of the Year Award, Saltire Society Literary Awards, 2009
ISBN 978-0199208999
OCLC 318409912
LC Class PE1591 .H55 2009

The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) is the print edition of the largest thesaurus in the world, the Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE), conceived and compiled by the English Language Department of the University of Glasgow. The HTE is a complete database of all the words in the second edition of The Oxford English Dictionary, arranged by semantic field and date. In this way, the HTE arranges the whole vocabulary of English, from the earliest written records in Old English to the present, alongside types and dates of use. It is the first historical thesaurus to be compiled for any of the world's languages and contains 800,000 meanings for 600,000 words, within 230,000 categories, covering more than 920,000 words and meanings.[4][5] As the HTE website states, "in addition to providing hitherto unavailable information for linguistic and textual scholars, the Historical Thesaurus online is a rich resource for students of social and cultural history, showing how concepts developed through the words that refer to them."[6]

The ambitious project was announced at a 1965 meeting of the Philological Society by its originator, Michael Samuels.[7] Work on the HTE started in 1965 and version 1.0 was published as a two-volume set as HTOED on 22 October 2009, after 44 years of work.[8] It consists of two slipcased hardcover volumes, totaling nearly 4,000 pages. The HTE, released as version 4.2 in September 2014, is freely available online from the University of Glasgow.[3]

Main sections

The work is divided into three main sections: the External World, the Mind, and Society. These are broken down into successively narrower domains. The text eventually discriminates more than 236,000 categories. The second order categories are:[9]

References

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  3. 3.0 3.1 3.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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  9. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. An oversize, one-page listing of all categories in top three tiers is available for download here.

External links

  • Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. open access publication - free to read