David Crystal - Words in Time and Place: Exploring Language Through the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary

Welcome to the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) or, rather, a tiny part of it. This huge two-volume work was published in 2009, with an online version viewable on the main OED website (http://www.oed.com). It was nothing short of a breakthrough in the historical study of English. I had been waiting for such a work for almost the whole of my linguistic life. I was in the audience at the Philological Society in 1965 when its originator, Michael Samuels, made public his proposal. His ambitious plan to chart the semantic development of the entire language over a thousand years was received with a mixture of incredulity and anticipation. Not only would it be the first historical thesaurus for any language, it would be dealing with a language whose vocabulary was known to be especially large. Expectation grew as articles and books began to be published on aspects of its content, and when it appeared, over 40 years later, it was widely acclaimed by readers for its breadth and depth of coverage. Since then, historians, linguists, philologists, and language enthusiasts in general have been working out the best ways of exploring and exploiting this unique resource. Words in Time and Place is an introduction to its treasures. My aim is to illustrate the way the HTOED is organized, to show the synergy between the thesaurus and its lexicographical parent, and to explore some of the linguistic and social insights that emerge from this interaction.

The title HTOED contains two terms, thesaurus and dictionary, that are not usually seen in such a close relationship, as they deal with the study of vocabulary from opposite points of view. We use a dictionary when we encounter a word and want to find out its meaning (or some other aspect of its use). We use a thesaurus when we encounter a meaning and want to find out the words that best express it. Bringing the two approaches together always presents a challenge.

The traditional approach is that of the dictionary. Here the words are organized alphabetically, a principle first made explicit in the history of English by Robert Cawdrey in his Table Alphabeticall (1604), who finds it necessary to tell his readers how to use his book (I have modernized his spelling):

If thou be desirous (gentle Reader) rightly and readily to understand, and to profit by this Table, and such like, then thou must learn the Alphabet, to wit, the order of the Letters as they stand, perfectly without book, and where every Letter standeth: as (b) near the beginning, (n) about the middest, and (t) toward the end. Now if the word, which thou art desirous to find, begin with (a) then look in the beginning of this Table, but if with (v) look towards the end. Again, if thy word begin with (ca) look in the beginning of the letter (c) but if with (cu) then look toward the end of that letter. And so of all the rest.

The alphabetical principle is an enormous convenience (once one has learned to spell), but it is a semantic irrelevance. Words which belong together are separated: aunt under A, uncle under U. We do not learn words in alphabetical order, either as children or adults. Rather, we learn them in a meaningful relation to each other as we develop our understanding of areas of experience. From the earliest years, vocabulary is presented to children thematically: they learn to distinguish aunts from uncles, cats from dogs, and hot taps from cold taps. In short, they learn the way the world is organized, lexically, into semantic fields.

The thesaurus a genre that actually pre-dates alphabetical dictionaries solved this problem. Rogets Thesaurus of 1852 is probably the best-known exemplar, and its full title summarizes its purpose: Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition. There had been books of synonyms before Roget, organized alphabetically, like a dictionary. What Roget did was group these thematically, and organize his themes into a hierarchy that covered all areas of meaning. An index at the back of the book lists all the words in alphabetical order, so that a user can find the places in the thesaurus where they appear. But there are no definitions. A thesaurus assumes that you know what the words mean or, if you do not, that you will look them up in a dictionary.

We might think that the ideal lexical product would be to combine the strengths of a dictionary with those of a thesaurus into a single book, but it takes only a moments reflection to see how impossibly large and unwieldy such a conflation would be.