The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary

In the course of my work for my reference class last semester, I discovered the fascinating lexicon of the English language that is the Oxford English Dictionary. I will write more about this later, but now I would like to write about the recently published thesaurus to the dictionary.

In my writing, there is no more powerful tool than the thesaurus, and the HTE is simply there is. Containing twice the entries of the next-largest thesaurus (Roget’s), the HTS is the result of 44 years of work. There are 600,000 words in the thesaurus, and the meanings are traced through history, like the OED. I have yet to see one “in the flesh,” but I would love to have one of these for my own library! Here are some interesting videos about the HTE to tell you more: