Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary
Posted by release.com | Filed under book
Why be content with availing yourself with today’s synonyms when you can reach into this treasure to employ a tasty historical adjective and rescue it from obsoletion.
The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary has been described by New Yorker as “the ultimate volume for the word-fetishist.”
It is a collection of all words in the Oxford English Dictionary, plus additional historical words, organised semantically. It has taken over forty years to produce the first edition and it was nearly lost, destroyed by fire in 1978.
The thesaurus eschews Roget's categorisation for its own ordering. Divided into three parts - the external, mental and social worlds, it has 354 major categories and more than 236,000 subcategories.
A sample page (PDF) demonstates the categorisation.
Listen to an MP3 of editor Christian Kay talk about the project.
Available from Amazon.com
Those with access to the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary should start bugging their librarians to subscribe to the forthcoming online edition of the thesaurus.
For those, like myself unable to justify the expense of a copy, I recommend searching the catalogue of your local library, and again fervently suggesting it orders ...