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The Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE)

The Historical Thesaurus of English is the first historical thesaurus to be compiled for any of the world's languages. It intends to include almost the entire recorded vocabulary of English from Old English to the modern period, taken from the Oxford English Dictionary and dictionaries of Old English. The distinctive, semantically-structured hierarchy of the HTE data allows scholars access to material in a uniquely flexible manner, making it an invaluable resource to historians and linguists in particular.

The Historical Thesaurus was begun in 1964 by Professor M.L.Samuels and has been funded by the AHRB, British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Carnegie Trust, and The University of Glasgow. The project is hosted by the University of Glasgow.

The Project

The Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE) offers scholars unique materials for the study of the history of the English language. It includes almost the entire recorded vocabulary of English from Old English to the modern period, arranged in chronological order in a semantically-structured hierarchy. It resembles works like Roget's Thesaurus in that words are arranged according to their meanings rather than listed alphabetically. It differs, however, from any other thesaurus so far produced by listing obsolete words and obsolete meanings of current words as well as treating contemporary English comprehensively. It also has a new system of classification suited to a large body of historical material. The Thesaurus of Old English (TOE) supplements the data of the HTE and can be used as a discrete resource in the form of an online searchable database.

Primary Aims

The creation and use of thesauri is a long-established method of organizing words for the purpose of understanding the relationship between both closely-related words and those in the language as a whole. The creation of an English language historical thesaurus dates back to 1964 when Professor M.L. Samuels of Glasgow University announced an initiative to produce a comprehensive study of the English vocabulary. The raw data in this archive now consists of 650,000 slips representing material taken from the Oxford English Dictionary and its supplements, and Anglo-Saxon dictionaries. From the perspective of reviewing and illustrating technical methods, it is the development and refinement of the classification structure and the application of it to research which will be of interest to those involved with developing tools and techniques.

The thesaurus is significant to researchers working in a number of areas, including linguistics, stylistic studies, literary history, the history of ideas and cultural studies. It offers scholars unique material that will help them determine not only the range and meaning of words that were available to writers at different periods throughout English history, but also, in a less specific but enormously valuable way, how the prominence and significance of different ideas have waxed or waned or remained consistent, from the period of usage defined as Old English (c.700 – 1100 A.D.) through to the present day. With dates associated with particular word forms and words related by semantic groups, the number of words that relate to any particular object or idea becomes a significant figure in itself, denoting as it does more or less societal and literary focus on that concept.

Another related application of the thesaurus could be the creation of a probability-based method of disambiguating historical word-forms. The precise meaning of a word and how it was used in any particular historical context can be indicated by the quantity and meaning of semantically linked words that were also in use at that particular juncture. Variant spellings are a problem in historical word searches, and context will often be a more informative guide to meaning than the form of the word itself.

Whilst quantitative methods such as this are far from infallible, they give useful indications of trends and likelihood, especially if the methods can be applied to a rich and comprehensive data source. The complex hierarchical structure of the HTE allows for sophisticated qualifiers to be introduced that will weight linkages that appear closer together within that hierarchy. The development of the classification system, which is the principal methodological component that determines the use of the HTE as a case study, involves the designation of the data into three major divisions:

• The World, including the physical universe, plants and animals
• The Mind, covering man's mental activities
• Society, which deals with social structures and artefacts

These top-level divisions are then divided into numbered hierarchical categories that further subdivide into sub-categories that are associated with lengthening numerical strings. Semantic paths are therefore established that associate general concepts with minute details.

Example: