Tags
anachronism, English language, historical thesaurus, History, Oxford Thesaurus, University of Glasgow, writing
Do you know the Historical Thesaurus of English?
It’s a project of the University of Glasgow, providing information on the history of nearly 800000 words. It…
…enables users to pinpoint the range of meanings of a word throughout its history, their synonyms, and their relationship to words of more general or more specific meaning.
I’ve been using it for some time now, and, given my obsession with linguistic anachronisms, find it absolutely priceless. Not only does it tell you when the word you want entered in literary or common use, and what exactly did it mean back then and later – but you can browse by category, and find out what other words were used when, to indicate the same concept…
It’s the historical novelist’s perfect toy – and it’s freely accessible online here. Just one warning: it’s one of those e-places you go to find out about one little word, and when you come up for breath, hours have happily gone by.
Scribblings 
Wonderful resource – I went and searched for “swape” (the first word that comes to mind in similar circumstances) and found a wealth of alternatives… if only, if only…
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Oh yes – the swape. Then again, had you had the Histhesaurus back then, perhaps there would be no such thing as The (Very Very Secret) Order of the Swape…
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Which sort of hints at how, when knowledge is hard to access, secret cliques and strange cabals are born 😉
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Hm… Is this a story that I see before me?
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It might as well be, my dear lady…
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