The Joys of Thesaurus Writing
The new edition of Oxford's largest single-volume thesaurus, the Oxford Thesaurus of English, is now available. Below, the editor of the book, Maurice Waite, discusses how he compiled the thesaurus and describes what he enjoys about his job.
'Some people think that writing a thesaurus is not as 'demanding' as writing a dictionary, possibly because a thesaurus looks simpler on the page: lists of alternative words and little else. But those people are unlikely ever to have written one! Thesauruses may not give definitions, pronunciations, or origins, but it is just as important as with dictionary-writing to keep the different senses of words apart in your mind all the time: you must continually compare the sense of the entry word with every synonym you are including and ask yourself questions like 'Does this word mean different things when used differently (as a plural noun or a passive verb, for example)'? If so, it will have very different synonyms, and a new sense section of the entry may be necessary. Again, 'How much do the senses overlap?' Sometimes you find that a synonym shares a certain amount of its meaning with the entry word, but to include it would be misleading.
However, enough of this sob story! For me, the fun bit of editing an Oxford thesaurus is the job of compiling or updating the lists of words, such as 'Plants', 'Sports', and 'Motor Vehicles', which we now include in the Wordfinder section in the middle of the book. Some of these lists rarely, if ever, need updating, like 'Orchestral Instruments' or 'Vitamins', but there are always new items being invented or discovered that can be added to 'Computer Parts and Peripherals', 'Illnesses', or 'Weapons', for instance, such as dongle, swine flu, and improvised explosive device.
Some recently added lists have been compiled from our largest single-volume dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary of English, where, hidden in its database, nouns are classified by type: as 'animal', 'vehicle', 'worker', 'architectural feature', 'paper size', and even 'feeling', 'punishment', etc. One of my favourite new lists is 'Police Officers and Forces', which produced a fascinating collection of terms drawn together from around the world, as diverse as a Bow Street runner from Britain, the LAPD from the USA, a havildar from South Asia, and the Stasi from the former East Germany.
To complement these lists of things, we recently added to the Oxford Thesaurus of English some lists of words— 'Archaic Words', 'Foreign Words and Phrases', 'British and North American Equivalents', for example. The one I most enjoyed compiling was the list of 'Imitative Words'. Also known as onomatopoeic words, these all imitate a noise, and I realized as I was working that they fall into two categories:
♦ words that describe the noise itself, such as beep, graunch, and sizzle
♦ words that are the names of whatever makes the noise, which can be any of the following:
– a thing, such as tom-tom, flip-flop, or hubble-bubble
– an animal (most examples being birds), such as cuckoo, peewit, or gecko
– a movement, such as crash, sloosh, or whizz
– something we do with our bodies, such as munch, spit, or hum
– occasionally a person, such as flibbertigibbet or, if you count derived words, gabbler and tattle-tale
Some imitative words are even in more than one category, meaning both a noise and the object or action that makes it, such as whistle, splash, and zip.
Pick up an Oxford thesaurus and get more fun out of your language!'
Maurice Waite
Editor, Oxford Thesaurus of English
For more details on the new edition of the Oxford Thesaurus of English which contains over 600,000 synonyms and antonyms, please click here.
Maurice Waite
20/08/09
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