The right word at the right time: the contents and uses of the Historical Thesaurus of English - Fraser Dallachy
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The right word at the right time: the contents and uses of the Historical Thesaurus of English - Fraser Dallachy
- 1. The Historical Thesaurus of English Fraser Dallachy (University of Glasgow) fraser.dallachy@glasgow.ac.uk
- 2. Outline • Some historical background • Exploring the Thesaurus • Use for specific purposes • Some interesting things • The future
- 3. Michael Samuels Christian Kay
- 4. “In effect what we are doing is turning the OED inside out: going through each volume of the dictionary, compiling slips for the material to be included in the Thesaurus, then giving each slip a place in the semantic classification.” Leslie Collier & Christian Kay (1981)
- 9. Date range
- 15. The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (2009)
- 24. Some Quick Questions • Can you find: • How many meanings are there of ‘bubble’? • How many of these are nouns? • The earliest word the Thesaurus has recorded for ‘space ship’? • A potential alternative term for ‘electricity’? • Any number of alternative terms for (especially small) weapons, such as ‘pistol’ and ‘dagger’? Image: NASA
- 29. Lucy strolled through the town centre with as much nonchalance as she could muster. Emmett talked insistently, seemingly only pausing when it became absolutely necessary to draw breath. “Do you see that group of teenagers?” His hand flashed out to the right but Lucy wasn’t fast enough to catch the specific direction in which he had pointed. “The fashion for such gaudy stockings appals me. Clothing should be modest; it is protection from the weather, not peacock display!” Lucy thought of the tapestries hanging in the manor house; the bright colours and flowing finery of Odysseus and Penelope’s house guests regularly transfixed her. As she looked them over again in her mind she wondered if there had ever been a time when Emmett’s prudishness had held sway. “I think if that were true life would be very drab,” she murmured, but Emmett barely seemed to notice she had spoken and ploughed on regardless.
- 30. Lucy strolled through the town centre with as much nonchalance as she could muster. Emmett talked insistently, seemingly only pausing when it became absolutely necessary to draw breath. “Do you see that group of teenagers?” His hand flashed out to the right but Lucy wasn’t fast enough to catch the specific direction in which he had pointed. “The fashion for such gaudy stockings appals me. Clothing should be modest; it is protection from the weather, not peacock display!” Lucy thought of the tapestries hanging in the manor house; the bright colours and flowing finery of Odysseus and Penelope’s house guests regularly transfixed her. As she looked them over again in her mind she wondered if there had ever been a time when Emmett’s prudishness had held sway. “I think if that were true life would be very drab,” she murmured, but Emmett barely seemed to notice she had spoken and ploughed on regardless.
- 31. Lucy strolled through the town centre with as much nonchalance as she could muster. Emmett talked insistently, seemingly only pausing when it became absolutely necessary to draw breath. “Do you see that group of teenagers?” His hand flashed out to the right but Lucy wasn’t fast enough to catch the specific direction in which he had pointed. “The fashion for such gaudy stockings appals me. Clothing should be modest; it is protection from the weather, not peacock display!” Lucy thought of the tapestries hanging in the manor house; the bright colours and flowing finery of Odysseus and Penelope’s house guests regularly transfixed her. As she looked them over again in her mind she wondered if there had ever been a time when Emmett’s prudishness had held sway. “I think if that were true life would be very drab,” she murmured, but Emmett barely seemed to notice she had spoken and ploughed on regardless.
- 32. Lucy strolled through the town centre with as much nonchalance as she could muster. Emmett talked insistently, seemingly only pausing when it became absolutely necessary to draw breath. “Do you see that group of teenagers?” His hand flashed out to the right but Lucy wasn’t fast enough to catch the specific direction in which he had pointed. “The fashion for such gaudy stockings appals me. Clothing should be modest; it is protection from the weather, not peacock display!” Lucy thought of the tapestries hanging in the manor house; the bright colours and flowing finery of Odysseus and Penelope’s house guests regularly transfixed her. As she looked them over again in her mind she wondered if there had ever been a time when Emmett’s prudishness had held sway. “I think if that were true life would be very drab,” she murmured, but Emmett barely seemed to notice she had spoken and ploughed on regardless.
- 33. Lucy strolled through the town centre with as much nonchalance as she could muster. Emmett talked insistently, seemingly only pausing when it became absolutely necessary to draw breath. “Do you see that group of teenagers?” His hand flashed out to the right but Lucy wasn’t fast enough to catch the specific direction in which he had pointed. “The fashion for such gaudy stockings appals me. Clothing should be modest; it is protection from the weather, not peacock display!” Lucy thought of the tapestries hanging in the manor house; the bright colours and flowing finery of Odysseus and Penelope’s house guests regularly transfixed her. As she looked them over again in her mind she wondered if there had ever been a time when Emmett’s prudishness had held sway. “I think if that were true life would be very drab,” she murmured, but Emmett barely seemed to notice she had spoken and ploughed on regardless.
- 34. Lucy strolled through the town centre with as much nonchalance as she could muster. Emmett talked insistently, seemingly only pausing when it became absolutely necessary to draw breath. “Do you see that group of teenagers?” His hand flashed out to the right but Lucy wasn’t fast enough to catch the specific direction in which he had pointed. “The fashion for such gaudy stockings appals me. Clothing should be modest; it is protection from the weather, not peacock display!” Lucy thought of the tapestries hanging in the manor house; the bright colours and flowing finery of Odysseus and Penelope’s house guests regularly transfixed her. As she looked them over again in her mind she wondered if there had ever been a time when Emmett’s prudishness had held sway. “I think if that were true life would be very drab,” she murmured, but Emmett barely seemed to notice she had spoken and ploughed on regardless.
- 37. Present Day Samuel Johnson (18th C) Shakespeare (17th C) Chaucer (14th C)
- 42. The Future: The Time-Traveller’s Dictionary Image: afternewton.wordpress.com • Specialised resource • Creative writing • Users select a subject and a time period • Interface would return a filtered Thesaurus hierarchy • Only terms active in selected period
Editor's Notes
- Work on the Historical Thesaurus was begun in 1969 under then head of English Language at Glasgow, Professor Michael Samuels. The project was seen to completion by Professor Christian Kay and published in 2009.
- This summarises the purpose of the work – to create a resource which organised the contents of the OED by meaning rather than alphabetically, initially as a resource for historical semantics (the study of how the language has encoded meaning in its vocabulary over time).
- This is one of the hundreds of thousands of slips produced in the creation of the Thesaurus. Members of staff at Glasgow would take a section of the OED (2nd ed.) and copy out each meaning of each headword onto a different slip, along with important information about that word meaning. Some of this data is highlighted in the next few slides.
- ‘v. tr.’ = ‘transitive verb’ i.e. a verb which takes a direct object
- The short dictionary definition tried to retain important wording from the OED definition in the theory that this would be crucial in later deciding on categorization.
- Date ranges can be quite complex. A dash represents continuous use between two dates. A ‘+’ indicates a gap of (usually) at least 150 years between citations. A slash indicates that these two dates are from different printings of the same work.
- There was a tentative plan to structure or cross-reference parts of the Thesaurus using Roget’s Thesaurus structure, but it quickly became apparent this was not feasible due to the huge complexity of the data.
- The next few slides show some of the staff and students of Glasgow ‘at work’ on the Thesaurus. Once all the slips were created they were bundled together by similarity of meaning. Staff and students then worked through these bundles trying to arrange the slips into a sensible structure. Once this categorization was done, slips were typed up into a computer database.
- When completed, a print edition was produced by Oxford University Press under the title ‘The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary’
- This view shows the layout of the print edition.
- Here is a close-up of some categories. Each category is given a code number which denotes its position in the Thesaurus’ hierarchy structure. Each category has as many associated ‘part of speech’ divisions as are necessary (i.e. for nouns, verb, adjectives, etc.). Concepts related to a category but which do not include enough vocabulary to be worth of a full category in their own right are given as ‘subcategories’, and these are indicated by bold numbers within a category’s listing
- The data was also published on a free-to-access website by the University of Glasgow. The Historical Thesaurus of English (HT) and the Historical Thesaurus of the English Dictionary (HTOED – also available online via the OED’s website) have diverged to some extent since the creation of these resources and, as a result, it’s important not to conflate the two.
- Here is an example of a category in the HT. Categories often groups roughly synonymous words rather than ‘strict’ synonyms (and, indeed, there is an academic debate as to whether strict synonymy is actually possible) partly in order to avoid every word occupying its own subcategory!
- The online resource is much easier to search than the paper version, and allows narrowing of the search by a number of types of data.
- Here is the result of a search for all the meanings of a word. Each meaning is given on a different line along with its dates of activity. Clicking on one of the category headings in this display will take the user to that category.
- Here is an example of what you get when you click through from search results to a category page. The word for which you originally searched is highlighted in yellow.
- If you’re interested, the very first word in the very first category is ‘brytengrund’ – the HT’s data on Old English is drawn from ‘A Thesaurus of Old English’, created as a pilot to the full HT as the OED does not include Old English lexis unless it survives into the medieval period or later.
- Here are some quick examples to try out your ability to use the Thesaurus. These were chosen on the basis that words like these are often of interest to authors who would like plausible alternatives or historically appropriate terms for fiction which is set in historical or alternative-history settings.
- A useful feature added to the Thesaurus recently are mini-timelines which show roughly when and for how long a word was used.
- Items with a single date (a result of a single citation) show up as narrow bands on the timeline. It’s worth being wary of these as they may not have been regularly used.
- It is possible, using the magnifying glass icon to access a menu which will search for the term in other resources.
- Clicking on the magnifying glass results in this pop-up box. Clicking on one of these resources will run a search for the relevant term in that resource. It is worth noting that – at the moment – the OED link takes you to a headword entry and not to the specific sense of the word in question, although we’re working to change that and link directly sense-to-sense.
- Here is a quick exercise. Have a look at this passage. Imagine it is from a historical novel set in the 1450s. It would be a bit silly to try to replace every single word or idea which was not available at the time, but see if you can spot any particularly egregious examples. Some authors have told us that they often use the Thesaurus to find good words for use in different historical periods!
- Here are just a few of the words which might be anachronous. Looking them up in the HT helps identify whether there is evidence for their use at the time, as well as showing alternatives with approximately the same meaning.
- The word ‘teenager’ does not exist in the 1450s, but the concept does seem to be given a specific word (adolescent) not that long after
- There is no known word meaning ‘gaudy’ in the 1450s (which doesn’t mean that the concept did not exist! There just wasn’t a specific word for it)
- ‘Peacock’, perhaps surprisingly, does exist at the time!
- ‘Drab’ wasn’t used until the 19th Century, but it is very definitely a concept that has been named throughout time.
- This is an overview of the full Thesaurus created by Professor Marc Alexander. Each dot is a word, the darker the dot, the older the word. You can see that some patches are lighter and darker than others depending on how ‘new’ the concepts are for the languages.
- Overlaying the category headings on the image helps us see which concepts are ‘older’ than others. Unsurprisingly, most of the light patches are to do with scientific or technological development
- This image shows the comparative size of recorded vocabulary for four different period in the history of the language. It demonstrates just how much the language has grown in size over the last 500 years or so.
- Semanticists use the Thesaurus to study the development of meaning in the language. This image shows how the active vocabulary of the whole Thesaurus grows over time.
- This image shows how the active vocabulary in different colour categories grows over time. In general, they follow the same trends as are seen for the language as a whole, but some colours produce more or fewer new words as time goes on. Red is more productive than the other colours, whereas orange is, by comparison, very stable.
- We’re beginning to look into how these patterns appear across all the categories of the Thesaurus. The website has an experimental section which allows users to lay around searching for categories which show particular patterns of development.
- This ‘heat map’ visualisation shows whether categories are larger or smaller than they would be expected to be if they were to devlop evenly across time. Dark green shows categories which are larger than expected, dark blue categories which are smaller than expected. The lighter a box is, the closer to the expected value the category is at that point in time.
- The HT team is considering how to make the Thesaurus more useful outside of academia. One idea is to try and create an easier-to-use website that will allow someone looing for words for a particular subject from a particular historical period to access this information rapidly. Watch this space.
- Well, watch THIS space – these are the links for the Thesaurus and related projects. Please do look at them yourselves and send any feedback you have to the team. Thank you!