Historical Thesaurus of English

The ''Historical Thesaurus of English'' (''HTE'') is the largest thesaurus in the world. It is called a ''historical thesaurus'' as it arranges the whole vocabulary of English, from the earliest written records in Old English to the present, according to the first documented occurrence of a word in the entire history of the English language. The HTE was conceived and begun in 1965 by the English Language & Linguistics department of the University of Glasgow, who have ever since continued to compile the thesaurus. From the 1980s onwards the project was moved from paper-based records to a computer database.

Today, the HTE is available to the public online, but a print version, the ''Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary'' (''HTOED''), was published in 2009.

Main project: The Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE)

The ''Historical Thesaurus of English'' (''HTE'') is a complete database of all the words in the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' and other dictionaries (including Old English), arranged by semantic field and date. In this way, the ''HTE'' arranges the whole vocabulary of English, from the earliest written records in Old English to the present, alongside dates of use.

It is the first historical thesaurus to be compiled for any of the world's languages and contains 800,000 meanings for 600,000 words, within 230,000 categories. As the ''HTE'' website states, "in addition to providing hitherto unavailable information for linguistic and textual scholars, the ''Historical Thesaurus'' online is a rich resource for students of social and cultural history, showing how concepts developed through the words that refer to them."

Structure

The work is divided into three main sections: the External World, the Mind, and Society. These are broken down into successively narrower domains. The text eventually discriminates more than 236,000 categories.
The second order categories are:

;I. The External World

# The earth
# Life
# Health and disease
# People
# Animals
# Plants
# Food and drink
# Textiles and clothing
# Physical sensation
# Matter
# Existence and causation
# Space
# Time
# Movement
# Action/operation
# Relative properties
# The supernatural

;II. The Mind

# Mental capacity
# Attention and judgment
# Goodness and badness
# Emotion
# Will
# Possession
# Language

;III. Society

# Society and the community
# Inhabiting and dwelling
# Armed hostility
# Authority
# Law
# Morality
# Education
# Faith
# Communication
# Travel and travelling
# Occupation and work
# Trade and finance
# Leisure

History

The ambitious project was announced at a 1965 meeting of the Philological Society by its originator, Michael Samuels. Work on the ''HTE'' started in the same year.

In 2017, the University of Glasgow was awarded the Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher Education for the ''HTE''.

A second edition of the online HTE is currently in progress and is expected to be launched in late 2020. Work is released on the freely-available ''HTE'' website when available.

Print edition: Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED)

On 22 October 2009, after 44 years of work, version 1.0 of the HTE was published by Oxford University Press in a two-volume slipcased set as the ''Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary'' (''HTOED''). The two hardcover volumes together total nearly 4,500 pages.

References

External links

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{{Dictionaries of English

Classification systems
History of the English language
Knowledge representation
Language histories
Thesauri (lexicography)
Works derived from the Oxford English Dictionary