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RR 2011/27 Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary: With Additional Material from A Thesaurus of Old English Christian Kay and others Oxford University Press Oxford 2009 ISBN 978 0 19 920899 9 £275 $495
2 vols
Keywords Dictionaries, English language, History, Thesauri
Review DOI 10.1108/09504121111103218
The heroic age of reference books is not dead; the computer may have replaced the paper slips in pigeon holes as the means of their production, but the essential human input remains. That is one of the heartening messages of this remarkable reference work. Remarkable? Well, two modest-seeming volumes in standard Oxford dark blue cloth look innocuous enough, but then prove to contain a completely new way of presenting the historical lexicography of an entire language. For here is the entire English vocabulary from Anglo-Saxon to the present day arranged in a thematic order by meanings: an enterprise attempted for no other language.
The thesaurus itself is not a new concept, of course: we are all familiar with Roget and his many contemporary followers as the boon for those stuck for a word. But this is quite different. Indeed, one of the first pieces of advice in its introduction is not to dispose of the traditional thesauri in your stocks: they serve a quite different purpose from this. So, what is the purpose of this? "Put at its simplest, its purpose is to provide a detailed record of the English vocabulary from the earliest times to the present, with sufficient accompanying information that, for any given period in the past, the user should be able to ascertain the exact state of the vocabulary (i.e. the 'lexical system') which existed at that time". Then, too: "The purpose... is to present in a more accessible form the vast amount of information which has hitherto been, as it were, locked away in the alphabetical order imposed by dictionaries...".
It is this complete coverage of the historical vocabulary which makes this new thesaurus unique: other thesauri, of course, omit obsolete words or obsolete meanings of words still in use. Similarly, etymological dictionaries are restricted to an alphabetical arrangement. Here, meaning is paramount and every word has equal standing within that context.
As the title indicates, this is an historical thesaurus based entirely on...