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World first historical thesaurus to be published after 45 years' work

The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary will contain almost every word in English from Old English to the present day.

It will contain nearly 800,000 meanings, organised along similar lines to Roget's Thesaurus, into more than 236,000 categories and subcategories.

It is the first time such a thesaurus has been undertaken in any language.

Professor Christian Kay, now 68, has dedicated almost her whole career to the task, compiling the efforts of some 230 contributors into a gigantic database.

Now she hopes to gather them together for the launch party on October 22...
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)