The
Historical Thesaurus of English (
HTE) is a complete
database of all the words in the
Oxford English Dictionary and other dictionaries (including
Old English), arranged by
semantic field and date. In this way, the
HTE arranges the whole vocabulary of
English, from the earliest written records in Old English to the present, alongside dates of use. It is the first historical thesaurus to be compiled for any of the world's languages and contains 800,000 meanings for 600,000 words, within 230,000 categories. As the
HTE website states, "in addition to providing hitherto unavailable information for linguistic and textual scholars, the
Historical Thesaurus online is a rich resource for students of social and cultural history, showing how concepts developed through the words that refer to them."
Structure The work is divided into three main sections: the External World, the Mind, and Society. These are broken down into successively narrower domains. The text eventually discriminates more than 236,000 categories. The second order categories are: ;I. The External World • The earth • Life • Health and disease • People • Animals • Plants • Food and drink • Textiles and clothing • Physical sensation • Matter • Existence and causation • Space • Time • Movement • Action/operation • Relative properties • The supernatural ;II. The Mind • Mental capacity • Attention and judgment • Goodness and badness • Emotion • Will • Possession • Language ;III. Society • Society and the community • Inhabiting and dwelling • Armed hostility • Authority • Law • Morality • Education • Faith • Communication • Travel and travelling • Occupation and work • Trade and finance • Leisure
History The ambitious project was announced at a 1965 meeting of the
Philological Society by its originator,
Michael Samuels. Work on the
HTE started in the same year. In 2017, the University of Glasgow was awarded the
Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher Education for the
HTE. A second edition of the online HTE is currently in progress and is expected to be launched in late 2020. Work is released on the freely-available
HTE website when available. == Print edition: Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) ==