The Oxford English Thesaurus? More properly, The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary.
· The largest thesaurus resource in the world, covering more than 920,000 words and meanings based on the Oxford English Dictionary
· The very first historical thesaurus to be compiled for any of the world’s languages from medieval times through the present
· Synonyms listed with dates of first recorded use in English, in chronological order, with earliest synonyms first
· For obsolete words, the Thesaurus also includes last recorded use of word
· Uses a thematic system of classification
· Comprehensive index enables complete cross-referencing of nearly one million words and meanings
· Contains a comprehensive sense inventory of Old English
· Includes a free fold-out color chart which shows the top levels of the classification structure
· Made up of two volumes: The main text, comprising numbers sections for semantic categories, and the index, comprising a full A-Z look up of nearly one million lexical items
The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, published by Oxford University Press, is the culmination of 44 years of painstaking work by scholars at the University of Glasgow.
It not only groups words with similar meanings but does so in chronological order according to their history – with the oldest first and most recent last. According to its publisher, it’s the largest thesaurus in the world and the first historical thesaurus in any language.
With 800,000 meanings, 600,000 words and more than 230,000 categories and sub categories, it’s twice as big as Roget’s version.
And if that doesn’t have him turning in his grave, it also contains almost every word in English from Old English to the present day, or 2003 to be precise – the cut-off date for the new dictionary.
Yeah, I’d love to have that on the shelf … or on the nightstand …
(via Randy)