HTE

Further Information about the Thesaurus

The Historical Thesaurus of English is the first historical thesaurus to be compiled for any of the world's languages, and will include almost the entire recorded vocabulary of English from Old English to the modern period. It will resemble works like Roget's Thesaurus in that words will be arranged according to their meanings rather than listed alphabetically. It will, however, differ from any other thesaurus so far produced by listing obsolete words and obsolete meanings of current words as well as treating contemporary English comprehensively. Thus the word sad will appear under the heading 'satisfied' for the period 1000--1450, under 'steadfast, firm' for the period 1315--1667, and under 'sorrowful' for the period from 1366 to the present day. The Thesaurus will also have a completely new system of classification based on techniques developed in modern linguistics, and an alphabetical index for ease of reference.

The Historical Thesaurus will offer scholars unique research material for the study of linguistic and literary history. At the moment, no comprehensive semantic listing of the vocabulary is available, as the existing historical dictionaries are arranged alphabetically. Each section of the Thesaurus will contain lists of words arranged in chronological order, in a hierarchy allowing up to twelve places, and will show on the one hand the complete range of words ever used for a particular object or idea and on the other the range of words at the disposal of past writers for the expression of those ideas at any given period. If, for example, someone wanted to know what words were available to Shakespeare in a particular area of meaning, he would turn to the relevant section of the Thesaurus, where the chronological arrangement of the words would indicate all those current in Renaissance English.

The value of the work to stylistic analysis lies in the fact that no full assessment of the work of past writers can be made without a knowledge of the vocabulary of their periods. The Thesaurus will be equally valuable in linguistic studies, where it will contribute essential information to the study of meaning and change of meaning, and will also be relevant in such fields as the history of ideas and cultural history. It is envisaged that the work will be published in book form by Oxford University Press, probably in two volumes of about the same size as the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. At the same time a database is being created in Ingres for future research. Publication on CD-ROM is also likely.

The Historical Thesaurus began in 1964 when Professor M.L.Samuels announced in an address to the Philological Society that he and his colleagues in the English Language Department of Glasgow University had embarked on the task of producing this comprehensive study of the English vocabulary. The Thesaurus archive now contains some 650,000 slips, representing material taken from the Oxford English Dictionary and its supplements, and Anglo-Saxon dictionaries. Our policy has been to include all the Oxford English Dictionary material for the earlier stages of the language, but for later stages, when much more material was available to the editors, certain categories of words are excluded at the discretion of the researcher. These include specialised technical and dialect words, words occurring only in other monolingual dictionaries, compound words of obvious meaning and limited currency, and words recorded only once. Exceptions can always be made, for example when the one recorded use of the word is by an important author, and scientific vocabularies likely to have a long history, such as astronomy and medicine, are always covered.

Over the years we have been considering what system of classification would be best for a large thesaurus covering a long time-span. The classification which has resulted from examination of the data is based on a modified folk taxonomy. There are three major divisions: (I) The World, including the physical universe, plants and animals; (II) The Mind, covering man's mental activities; and (III) Society, which deals with social structures and artefacts. Within these major divisions the material is arranged in numbered hierarchical categories, each consisting of a defining heading followed by chronological lists of all the words, with their dates of currency, ever used as synonyms or near synonyms for the definition. The numbering system makes each word uniquely retrievable from within the database, in conjunction with material held in 29 fields covering part of speech, dates in various permutations, style labels and cross references. These fields make possible complex search questions such as 'Find all the words meaning 'laugh' first recorded between 1300 and 1500'.

Editorial work on the Thesaurus has three main stages: (1) preliminary sorting into the new structure; (2) editing to computer specifications and transference via disc to computer storage; (3) final editing. Most of the material has now passed through the first stage and many large sections such as The Earth, Life, Biology and Mankind have completed stage 2. A separate Thesaurus of Old English has been compiled in co-operation with King's College, London. The department is always pleased to hear from colleagues who might be interested in contributing to the project, or from potential postgraduate students. We are also glad to welcome visitors who are interested in discovering more about our work or to release available data for academic projects.

Financial support for the project has come from a variety of sources, notably the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Carnegie Trust, and The University of Glasgow. Publication of the Thesaurus is expected in the next few years.

Historical Thesaurus homepage