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Thursday, July 09, 2009

Nerd News: Oxford to Publish Historical Thesaurus of the English Language

Link via the lovely Ninme, who always has great links.

This news story makes me deliriously happy! Blurb:
Oxford University Press is publishing the world’s first historical thesaurus. This is a vast work, with about a million meanings organised into a quarter of a million categories. It has taken 50 years and millions of hours by scholars to produce. This is a gigantic Roget, but with the words dated chronologically. So it answers the question: “Which words were available to express concept X at period Y?”, from Beowulf to Beckett.
Awesome!
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2 comments:

  1. Marian1:19 PM

    Hmmm... is it me being afflicted with blindness or them 'Times' people being too lazy to provide the link? Oh well, Wikipedia to the rescue: Historical Thesaurus of English

    And btw, scnr to go kinda Jon Stewart here: Historical Thesaurus? That's great. Now back to your papers, MM! (great line; I plan to use it over and over again in the future)

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  2. Mad Minerva3:40 PM

    Oh, you're right, you're right -- back to the papers! ;-)

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