English revealed - in all its glory

October 2009 brings a very proud moment for a dedicated group of academics and researchers at Glasgow University - Oxford's publication of their unique work of scholarship, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Forty-four years in the making, this astonishing book is the outcome of 'turning the OED inside out'. However, when you perform such a radical action, you could stir up some unexpected consequences...

The Historical Thesaurus of the OED (HTOED) boasts two claims to fame - it's the world's largest thesaurus and it's the first of its kind in any language. Based on the 2nd edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the HTOED contains almost every word in that 20-volume dictionary, plus a considerable amount of Old English vocabulary, sourced from A Thesaurus of Old English.

The HTOED is organized in a similar way to a Roget's-style thesaurus, where the words are grouped together in sections according to their meanings. But its structure, developed specially for HTOED, is far more detailed than those found in other thesauruses, allowing for shades of meaning to be fully documented.

A further organizing principle is that each word appears in chronological order, according to its earliest recorded use in the OED. Open the book at any page, and the sense of history is overwhelming - here is our language, as never seen before, revealed in all its richness, from around 700 AD to today, from awogian (an Old English verb meaning 'to court or woo someone') to speed-dating.

One of the most entertaining discoveries I made, at the end of a long day's proof-checking, was the section documenting a positive devilry of ghoulies, ghosties, and things that go bump in the night. It seems fitting, with Halloween just around the corner, to share just a few of the revelations contained in the HTOED’s 3,952 pages.

Here's a small part of the Evil spirit/demon entry:

This snippet of text, apart from being such a fascinating list of nickers, skookums, weargs, bhuts, helrunas, and taipos that have disturbed people around the world and across the centuries, illustrates just how much information has been packed into every line of the thesaurus. Let's take a closer look at some words to see what HTOED can tell us:

• cargest: this is one of 15 words for this sense that are recorded only in Old English - you can tell this by the fact that the letters 'OE' are not followed by a short dash or any other date. This is also a case of a word that can be found in A Thesaurus of Old English rather than in OED. Old English runs from around 700-1150: a large number of such words disappeared after the Norman Conquest (1066), though many common ones survived in one form or another, as you can see from the next example.
• devil<deofol OE-: the word devil is familiar to everyone - the date shows that it was first recorded in Old English in this sense, while the short dash following 'OE' means that it's still in use today. Following devil, the arrow and the word deofol indicate that deofol is the Old English form that devil derives from.
• sprat 1432-1549: the dates following sprat show that it is no longer used to mean 'evil spirit' - in fact, it was only recorded in this sense from 1432 to 1549. If you looked sprat up in the OED, you'd also find that, in this sense, it's got nothing to do with the small fish, either!
• bhut 1785- (Indian): from the early 17th century, trade and exploration had a profound effect on English, which gained thousands of terms deriving from languages from far-flung corners of the world. India was one of the first countries whose many languages loaned words to English, as can be seen from bhut, a Hindi word for a spirit or goblin. Other loanwords in this section include skookum (a Chinook jargon term from North America), and taipo (a New Zealand word, possibly of Maori origin).

As the above example shows, if you wanted to discover more about most of these words, you'd be able to explore their full histories, origins, and meanings in the OED. The two books complement each other perfectly, each offering a different perspective on our language.

Reassuringly, all these demons are counterbalanced by extensive HTOED lists of deities of every description. In fact, the HTOED appears to have found favour with the forces of good rather than evil. Although a fire raged through the building housing the archive (in the form of thousands of paper slips) in 1978, the embryonic HTOED was spared as the slips were stored in metal cabinets. The only casualty was some copies of the OED, which ended up getting rather charred. Had the slips been destroyed, the consequences would have been disastrous: 13 years of work would have been lost.

Thankfully this was not the case, and the HTOED is about to gain its well-deserved place in the limelight over the coming months. The book is published in two volumes, the main thesaurus and an index, and is accompanied by a full-colour foldout wallchart displaying the main thematic sections. For much more information on the HTOED and to hear an interview with one of the project's authors, Professor Christian Kay, see www.oxfordonline.com/ht.

Catherine Soanes
Editorial Project Manager
English Dictionaries and Thesauruses

Author: Catherine Soanes

Date: 20/10/09

Printer friendly version

More details and ordering information