Historical Thesaurus of English
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE) is a major thesaurus of the English language, based at the University of Glasgow. The HTE is a complete database of all the words in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, arranged by semantic field and date. In this way, the HTE arranges the whole vocabulary of English from the earliest written records in English (in Old English) to the present alongside types and dates of use. It is the first historical thesaurus to be compiled for any of the world's languages and will contain approximately 650,000 entries. As its website states, "the Thesaurus will be equally valuable in linguistic studies, where it will contribute essential information to the study of meaning and change of meaning, and will also be relevant in such fields as the history of ideas and cultural history" [1].
The HTE has been in progress since 1964 and, as of 2007, is in its final stages. The Oxford University Press will publish the complete work in print and electronic editions.
[edit] Links
- [1] - HTE homepage, including a limited test website and the complete searchable Thesaurus of Old English (Roberts and Kay 1995, 2000)
