April 26th, 2010
Product Description
A 40-year project in the making, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is the first historical thesaurus to include almost the entire vocabulary of English, from Old English to the present day. Conceived and compiled by the Department of English Language of the University of Glasgow, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is a groundbreaking analysis of the historical inventory of English, allowing users to find words connected in meaning throughout the history of the language.
· The largest thesaurus resource in the world, covering more than 920,000 words and meanings, based on the Oxford English Dictionary
· The very first historical thesaurus to be compiled for any of the world’s languages
· Synonyms listed with dates of first recorded use in English, in chronological order, with earliest synonyms first
· For obsolete words, the Thesaurus also includes last recorded use of word
· Uses a specially devised thematic system of classification
· Comprehensive index enables complete cross-referencing of nearly one million words and meanings
· Contains a comprehensive sense inventory of Old English
· Includes a free fold-out color chart which shows the top levels of the classification structure
· Made up of two volumes: The main text, comprising numbers sections for semantic categories, and the index, comprising a full A-Z look up of nearly one million lexical items
The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is a unique resource for word-lovers of all types-linguists and language specialists, historians, literary commentators, among others-as well as being a fascinating resource for everyone with an interest in the English language and its historical development. It is a perfect complement to the OED itself, allowing the words in the OED to be cross-referenced and viewed in wholly new ways.
Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary
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5 Comments
This work highly recommends itself; it is both wonderfully conceived and masterfully executed, as one will perceive immediately upon opening its covers. The English speaking world owes much gratitude to the editors: Michael Samuels, Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, and Irené Wotherspoon and the folks at Oxford University Press.
Rating: 5 / 5
As a thesaurus compiler myself, I find opening a treasury of words to be very exciting. The HTOED is the most exciting of all. It is an amazing labor of love and scholarship that is going to be so much fun to read and study.
Rating: 5 / 5
I’m returning it. The thesaurus is written in code of its own so complicated as to be virtually unintelligible. Other thesauri are readable; this one would take considerable trouble to master and it’s certainly not something you can browse casually for pleasure, as you can the O.E.D. The information it contains may be awe-inspiring, but I don’t want to have to go to cryptography school every time I want to look up a reference. I don’t think product descriptions and reviews have addressed this problem sufficiently. The idea of a vast historical thesaurus sounds wonderful, but the numeric gobbledygook that comprises this one is a deal-breaker. If I’d seen it in a store or library first, I’d never have bought it. I suggest that others who are fascinated by the scope and depth of the project try to see the book in person and check out its hideous organizational system before they actually buy.
Rating: 2 / 5
I agree that volume one is a pleasure to browse through. When you are at leisure, it’s fun to see what words were used to refer to a particular meaning throughout the times. But when you have to use volume two (the index) to locate a particular word in volume one, it’s a real pain. For example, when you want to look up “idiot” in volume one, there are eight entries listed in volume two the index. Just take the first entry, it’s like this: 01.02.01.02.01.03|01. It is such a long string of similar numbers that locating it in volume one is a rather laborious process. Well, I already have so many agonizing numbers to deal with in my life that this is really the last straw.
It’s OK when you just want to browse through volume one for fun. But when you want to look up a particular word, it’s a rather frustrating process.
But volume one alone is such a great work that overall I would still give this item four stars.
Rating: 4 / 5
I was about to send this back because I had the same reservations expressed in other reviews. The relatively small print! The bizarre organization! I had a very negative initial reaction. I put the two heavy and unwieldy volumes back in their box, wrapped them up and had them ready to send back to Amazon. Then I decided not to be too hasty and to give the volumes a second look. On the second look — both volumes open side by side — I fell in love.
The Oxford Historical Thesaurus is an inexhaustible intellectual gift to all English speakers. The lucidity of the categories gives you a new way to approach your language and a new way to approach the concepts in your own mind. Being able to watch words evolve from Old English to our modern time allows you to see the arrival and development of cherished concepts — the slow blooming of a branch as bud after bud opens off the central stalk. In the end even the typeface is pretty easily readable, (despite its relatively small font size). These books are an enduring invitation to jubilation.
Users of English owe an immense debt of gratitude to the researchers and compilers at the University of Glasgow and the University of London and all the teams of people who helped them over the long years of their labor.What they have built strikes me as far bigger even than their labors – a truly inexhaustible gift to English speakers.
Rating: 5 / 5
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