Lexical Searches for the Arts and Humanities		Test website
Supported by AHRC-ICT Grant AR112456

About the Project

The Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE) was founded by Professor M. L. Samuels in 1964, with a view to supplying a gap in materials available for the historical study of vocabulary. Data have been collected and classified by generations of university staff, research assistants and postgraduates. The completed database will contain around 650,000 word meanings, representing the English vocabulary from Old English (c700 A.D.) to the present, arranged according to their meanings and dates of use. The data are drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary, its supplements, and dictionaries of Old English. As final editing progresses, sections are being released for scholarly use, with the proviso that they cannot be guaranteed complete until all editing is finished. A list of sections available and a complete list of major categories can be accessed from the homepage.

Our contention is that a thesaurus arrangement of vocabulary can draw attention to new information or stimulate new ways of thinking about a topic. The data can be searched in a variety of ways. The basic search is Browse, which allows you to examine the vocabulary for a particular section, for example Music. A more targeted Synonym Search enables examination of a narrower concept, such as all the terms used for a trumpet. You can also narrow your searches by choosing particular dates or date ranges, such as all words with a first occurrence between 1450 and 1650, or stylistic labels, such as slang or Scots. Wildcard searches mean that compounds and derivative forms are retrieved, and there is also the facility to search on affixes.

If a word has more than one meaning, you will be invited to choose the appropriate heading to search under. When you reach the wordlist, entries appear in chronological order, with your search term highlighted in red. Results can be saved by copying to a Word file or equivalent. Navigation is via the back button or the title.

If you are interested in how abstract ideas are expressed, you could look at the sources of metaphors for a particular emotion or discover that there are 79 entries from Scots in the section on Pride. You could also look at how many words were current or new in a particular field at a designated time, as an indication of the contemporary importance of a topic. If you are searching library catalogues for a particular topic, you might find it helpful to search titles using keywords which are now obsolete.

At the moment we are offering you lists of words and dates. If you want more information about the words, such as definitions or etymologies, you should consult the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). In the longer term, Oxford University Press plans both to publish a print version and to link the electronic HTE to the online OED.

We cannot yet offer a facility for importing electronic texts into our platform. If you want to search texts, you should note the relevant words and then use something like the Find facility in Word to locate them in your text. For older texts, there may be issues over spelling, which we have tried to cope with through wildcard searches. You could also find possible variants in the OED and then search for them individually.

About the classification.

The material is classified initially into large areas of shared meaning (semantic fields), such as War, Food, or Emotion, as in a work such as Roget’s Thesaurus. Within these are sub-categories, in a hierarchy moving from the most general meaning to the most specific. Each heading is numbered: the more numbers a heading has, the more specific its meaning. Headings with number strings of the same size are at the same semantic level. Each of the dots between pairs of figures in the numbering system represents one level of subordination, up to a maximum of seven (achieved in highly taxonomic categories like Plants or War but rarely in more abstract ones).

Any of these categories may be further divided into five levels of sub-categories (colloquially known as ‘dot’ categories), representing further, very detailed, levels. These are indicated by numbers after a slash, as in 03.03.16.01.03.06.01/01 (.broadsword) and 03.03.16.01.03.06.01/02 (.scimitar) in Example1 below. Headings in the seven main categories begin with capital letters and in the sub-categories with lower case.

The material is further divided by part of speech. Where words from more than one part of speech belong to the same concept, they will have the same number, as in

n (noun)	03.03.01. . . .	War
aj (adjective)	03.03.01. . . .	Pertaining to war
av (adverb)	03.03.01. . . .	By war
vi (verb intransitive)	03.03.01. . . .	Wage war
vt (verb transitive)	03.03.01. . . .	Wage (war)
ph (phrase)	03.03.01. . . .	Catch phrases

Examples

Example 1: the taxonomy

03. Society
03.03  Armed hostility
03.03.16  Military equipment
03.03.16.01  Weapon
03.03.16.01.01  Club/stick
03.03.16.01.02  Other blunt weapon
03.03.16.01.03  Sharp weapon
03.03.16.01.03.01  Spear/lance
03.03.16.01.03.02  Pike
03.03.16.01.03.03  Halberd
03.03.16.01.03.04  Axe
03.03.16.01.03.05  Scythe
03.03.16.01.03.06  Side-arms
03.03.16.01.03.06.01  Sword
03.03.16.01.03.06.01/01  (.broadsword)
03.03.16.01.03.06.01/02  (.scimitar)
03.03.16.01.03.06.02  Knife/dagger

Reading down through Example1, the top level is 03 Society, one of three major sections into which the entire thesaurus is divided. 03.03 Armed hostility covers the general concept of warfare. At the next level is a set of categories running from 03.03.01 War to 03.03.19 Absence of War (Peace). At that point Armed Hostility is complete and we come to a new main category 03.04 Authority. Within each level, there is the potential for embedded categories at lower levels. Thus under 03.03.16 Military equipment we find Weapon at the next level, 03.03.16.01, and below that different types and sub-types of weapons. (This example is not comprehensive; there are, for instance, 27 different kinds or parts of swords listed in categories subordinate to 03.03.16.01.03.06.01 Sword.)

Headings are kept as brief as possible, and have to be read back to the main heading to create a definition. By supplying obvious links like ‘kind of’, users can reconstruct semantic pathways, reading back through the headings from lowest to highest, as in ‘a spear is a kind of sharp weapon, which is a kind of weapon, which is a kind of military equipment, which is used in armed hostilities, which are engaged in by societies’.

Example 2: reading an entry (see also Results Layout)

The examples on your screen will appear in columns, but here they are presented as continuous text. The dates are those for first and last recorded use as given in the OED. A dash after a date indicates currency up to the present; in case of doubt a bracket is added. Where there is a gap in currency of over 150 years, a plus sign + is used. All Old English words are labelled OE, without specific dates.

03.03.16.01.03.06 Side-arms: side-arms 1760 --; (.hilt) hilt<hilt(e) OE --; (..middle of hilt) midhilte OE; (..knob on hilt) pommel c1330--; plummet c1425-c1600sc; pummel 1483-1715.

The heading here is Side-arms, which has only one exponent, ‘side-arms 1760-- ’. This reads: the word side-arms is recorded in use from 1760 to the present day.

Next we find (.hilt), where the brackets and dot indicate one level of subordination, meaning ‘part of side-arms’. Its entry
‘hilt<hilt(e) OE-- ’ reads: the word hilt, which derives from Old English hilt(e), has been in use from Anglo-Saxon times up to the present time. The numbers for hilt (03.03.16.01.03.06/01) and other dot categories have been suppressed..

Following (.hilt) are headings with two dots each, indicating further subordination.
‘midhilte OE’ shows that the word is found only in Old English.
‘pommel c1330-- ’ has been in use from around 1330 to the present.
‘plummet c1425-c1600sc’ was in use in Scots between around 1425 and around 1600.
‘pummel 1483-1715’ was in use between 1483 and 1715.

c=circa: c1400 = around 1400
a=ante: a1400 = before 1400

All labels indicating style, region, etc. are reduced to two-character codes, as:
sc=Scots, sl=slang. A complete list is accessible from the Style and Status Labels - main page.

If you have any comments, please email Christian Kay