This week sees the long-awaited publication of The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary by Oxford University Press.
The 3,952 page thesaurus has taken more than forty years to produce, has been staffed by 230 people who have dedicated 320, 000 hours of research and includes more than 800, 000 meanings and synonyms for words, some of which haven’t been used since 700AD.
Ironically, the word with the largest category is “immediately”.
Professor Quirk of UCL called the HTOED, “the single most significant tool ever devised for investigating semantic, social and intellectual history”… and will come handy if you wanted another word for deawwyrm, ædre or squinny and happened to have £275 to spare.
