The Oxford English Dictionary has been called the world’s greatest dictionary, and it has been joined by what might be called the world’s greatest thesaurus, Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. This is no ordinary synonym-finder. More than 40 years in the making, it covers nearly a million words and expressions from Old English to the present day and organizes them under a hierarchical system of semantic categories and subcategories. Using the thesaurus, it’s possible to take a word and trace the range of meanings it has had since Old English days. This thesaurus can be a challenge to navigate, but it will be welcomed by scholars and language lovers. An online version will be released when the redesigned Oxford English Dictionary Online is launched later this year.
Indexed. 3,952p. $395 from Oxford University Press (978-0199208999)
