The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary was finally published yesterday after more than 40 years of research. From The Times
The editors have organised approximately 800,000 meanings into conceptual fields, which show the chronological development of themes and ideas. The three fundamental categories are the External World, the Mind, and Society. These are broken down into less broad domains: the External World is divided into the Earth, life, physical sensibility, matter, existence, relative properties, and the supernatural. The text eventually discriminates more than 236,000 categories; a giant index facilitates cross-referencing.
As the article later explains the beauty of this book is that it continues where the traditional thesaurus has left off, including words that are technical, archaic or obsolete. This may not sound amazingly useful at first but, to steal an example, if you are writing a Victorian historical fiction novel you can now easily work out which words were common vernacular at any given period in English history.
Let us suppose I want to know about the history of words used of people considered dirty. “Hog” has had this sense since the early 15th century, “daggle-tail” was first employed in the 1570s and is last recorded in 1881, and “scrubber” is first attested in 1959. In my novel of Victorian loucheness, there can be hogs and maybe daggle-tails, but no scrubbers.
“Cinema” – in the sense of the venue for film screenings – is first attested in 1913, five years after “picture palace”. “Movie house” can be spotted the following year, “nickelodeon” in 1921. “Ticket-chopper” first makes an appearance in 1915, “usherette” in 1925, and “drive-in” in 1950 – two years later than “ozoner”, an American slang term for the drive-in cinema.