Our Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary expert, Professor Christian Kay, blogs about the numerous press enquiries and interviews in the wake of the HTOED’s publication.

To read more about the HTOED click here.

An unexpected outcome of the publication of HTOED was the interest it generated in both UK and overseas media. On the whole, encounters with the press have been an enjoyable experience, and they’ve done us proud with articles, reviews, and interviews, but sometimes I find myself conning over the less flattering words for members of the journalistic profession (hack, penciller, tripe-hound, ink-slinger, creeper, thumb-sucker, press gang), and plotting my revenge.

So what interests the media? I learned to carry with me at all times a list of ‘favourite words’ to distribute on request. During the final stages of the project, I had asked the proofreaders to keep an eye open for anything suitable – unfortunately what they considered entertaining was often not what one would want to spell out over the phone or see in a family newspaper. However, I managed to offload such rare gems as spanghew ‘to cause a frog or toad to rise in the air’ (unfortunately mis-spelled as it whizzed round the world), purfle ‘to decorate with a purfle’, and ostrobogulous ‘indecent, somewhat bizarre’. I’m still waiting for a victim for Old English paddanieg ‘an island with frogs on it’ or weirding peas, a Scottish term for peas employed in divination.

Anecdotes were much in demand. Fortunately, we had one anecdote to cap them all, the Great Fire of 1978, when the building housing the project went on fire (as Glaswegians disingenuously say). At that time, all our research was contained in a single set of paper slips, which luckily were housed in metal cabinets and escaped unscathed. Recounting this for the twentieth time, it was tempting to embellish the narrative, rescuing screaming infants, or at least professors, from the flames rather than smouldering volumes of the OED.

Human interest questions varied in subtlety: “how many years have you worked on the project”, “how old were you when you started”, or simply, “how old are you?” Colleagues threatened to get me a badge like the ones children have on their birthdays, emblazoned with ‘I am 69’ to forestall such questions. Many reporters seemed to find it incredible that anyone would work on a project for 44 years, as several of us did. Some hinted that this was at the expense of a more fulfilling life, but I was nevertheless startled that in 2009 a newspaper would produce a headline describing me as a “lingo-loving spinster”, and one, moreover, who “coyly confessed” to celebrating publication with a glass of champagne.

I am not really a morning person, so the number of breakfast radio programmes requesting live (or fairly live) interviews was something of a trial (unless they were in Australia, which was fine, as the interviews took place in the evening). On publication day, I set off at 6.30 a.m. for the BBC headquarters in Glasgow, and by 7.45 had chatted brightly to four radio stations. At that point a colleague and I were handed a news story about an Australian golf course and asked to ‘translate’ it using HTOED synonyms, thus providing an uplifting finale to the programme at 8.55. HTOED does not abound in synonyms for the creatures which apparently haunt Australian golf courses, such as kangaroos, camels, dingos, and hairy-nosed wombats. We felt that we had done pretty well to produce boomers, ships of the desert, warrigals, and hirsute-nebbed badgers. Then we returned to campus to deal with three television crews.

One learned to be tolerant of minor inaccuracies (OED is a dictionary, OUP is a publisher; HTOED contains 800,000 different meanings, not 800,000 different words). Often I longed to launch into my first-year lectures on the history of the English language, while refusing even to attempt to answer such questions as “What is the oldest word in English?”

The closing question was often on the lines of “What are you going to do now?” as if life had come to a stop when the last slip was entered in the database (by coincidence, or careful planning, the last slip was the word thesaurus itself). One interviewer had thought this through, however, taking due account of age and gender, and asked: “And now you’ve finished, have you got something else you’d like to get back to, like your garden, or a big piece of knitting?” I’d like to put it on record that I do not have, and never have had, “a big piece of knitting”.

The Voulet-Chanoine Mission left Dakar on the coast of French West Africa in the late summer of 1898. They were heading for the Central African region of Lake Chad, with the aim of establishing effective borders between the French and British empires while “pacifying” a notoriously belligerant region. However, the mission descended into a horrific catalogue of colonial violence and cruelty that eerily prefigures fictional accounts of the “scramble for Africa” such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which originally published as a three-part series in 1899. When the story reached Paris in 1899 a second mission was sent out to investigate, culminating in a dramatic shoot-out when the two mission met in the July of that year. Below is a short extract from Bertrand Taithe’s new book on the subject, The Killer Trail: A Colonial Scandal in the Heart of Africa.

In the end, their tracks became clearer. Burnt villages signalled the progress of their journey. Occasionally, hanging bodies marked the entrances of villages while corpses littered the places they had visited. In the first few settlements beyond the uncertain borders of French Soudan the corpses had been arranged in shallow mass graves, a long dark blood stain hinting how the bodies had been dragged to their burial ground. Later on the corpses lay where they fell. To Colonel Klobb and his small squad of native troops of the French in West Africa, the so-called tirailleurs, it became obvious that the men they were looking for had lost their ways in every conceivable manner.

On 25 April 1899, Arsène Klobb had been sent after a much larger military ‘mission’ or ‘colonne’ led by two men: Captains Voulet and Chanoine, whose fates were so entwined that they have become almost a twin entity sharing a common tragedy: Voulet–Chanoine. These men were the kind of colonial figures known for their daring and initiative, the nationalists lionized. Indeed only a few years earlier they had been welcomed back in Paris as heroes. From heroes these men became villains, worse still, a national embarrassment. There had been early signs that the mission they led would encounter ‘difficulties’. When Klobb had received Voulet in Timbuktu, in November 1898 he had confided to his diaries: ‘Voulet is coming to me tomorrow. I am anxious, it seems to me that he is venturing into something he does not know. A conversation with him should tell me if that is the case.’ While driving his small group hard on Voulet’s track, Klobb noted in increasingly telegraphic style the evidence of destruction he encountered. On 5 July he wrote:

I am starting to be exhausted—I am still running. I am on the 5th longitude East and I still have not reached anything. It’s true that the expedition is a year ahead of me. I am in a village where I eat what has not been torched. Voulet burns everything—exactly. I do not encounter many difficulties: the inhabitants are terrorised by Voulet’s passing through, they run away when they see me coming; when they see the tirailleurs the bows and arrows fall from their hands.

On the 6th of the same month, on reaching Tibiri, ‘huge village with many gaps; entirely burnt. The dry moat is 4.5 metres deep to the tip of the wall. Women hanged.’

Klobb had received orders from the governor of the military colony of French Soudan, Colonel de Trentinian, who led from the city of Kayes a huge and ill-controlled territory which would cover most of today’s Burkina Faso, Mali, and (as Voulet’s advance furthered its borders to the east) the south of Niger. De Trentinian was acting on orders received through two telegrams sent from Paris. The first stated that a mission should be sent to catch up with the army of Captains Voulet and Chanoine to investigate the news leaked in the daily newspaper Le Matin. The second, sent three days later, ordered that both Voulet and Chanoine should be arrested and held accountable for their crimes:

Recent massacre Sansané Haoussa, 15 women and children—execution tirailleur—number of exhausted porters refusing march would have been beheaded then six massacres to obtain new porters—Tirailleurs alleged to have to bring hands to captains to show orders were executed—Captain Chanoine alleged to have put on sticks heads of inhabitants found in villages which would have been burnt twelve kilometres around—I hope the allegations are unfounded—if against all probability these abominable crimes are proven Voulet and Chanoine cannot continue to lead mission without a great shame for France . . . send from Say superior and subaltern officers join mission.

The minister of colonies’ telegram contained a summary of the allegations published in the Parisian press. These were leaked from the correspondence of a Lieutenant Péteau, dismissed a few weeks earlier by Voulet.

Some of the accusations seemed so extreme that officers on the ground such as Klobb were originally unconvinced. It is only gradually, the official version reveals, that he came to accept that something might be grievously wrong. According to his second in command, Lt. OctaveMeynier, Arsène Klobb was convinced, when, upon entering Birnin Konni, he saw little girls hanging from the low branches of the trees and over a thousand corpses rotting in the sun. For Klobb the decision to arrest Voulet seemed justified and in a letter to the rear, he noted, ‘I confess I find it hard to believe that French officers could have ordered such horror. I will do what I can to prevent a scandal but I will send Voulet and Chanoine back if I can.’ The mission had to continue but it had to change. Something had gone wrong east of the colonial border of French Soudan.

Today, Professor Christian Kay from the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary team talks about categorization in the HTOED.

Click here for more posts about the Historical Thesaurus.

When I first came to Glasgow, I was puzzled by children ringing my doorbell and asking, “Goat ony ginger boatles, Missus?” (which loosely translates as, “Do you have any ginger bottles which you might give us, Madam?”) I understood that they wanted to take the bottles back to the shop and claim a refund on them, but I could not understand why their trade was so specialized. To me, a ginger bottle must be a bottle containing a ginger-flavoured liquid. Only later did I learn that for Glaswegian children, and many adults, “ginger” was a generic term for any fizzy drink – what I, equally illogically, call lemonade.

What was happening here was a clash of categorization systems. The Glaswegians and I were surveying the world of drinks and organizing it in different ways. As an incomer, I had to learn the categories of their society if I was to operate successfully within it. A similar situation faces anyone moving to a new place, or learning a new language; children learning their first language may initially identify different categories from those employed by adults.

In the Historical Thesaurus of the OED, categories shift in time rather than in space. In category 01.02.07 People, for example, we find increasing numbers of relatively recent words referring to people in terms of their age: teenager (first recorded in OED2 in 1941), bobby-soxer (1944), pre-schooler (1954), subteenager (1959). The need to make such fine distinctions perhaps reflects the importance of age in our society, as do terms at the other end of the scale, such as senior citizen (1938), third age (1972), and, less flatteringly, wrinkly (1972) and crumbly (1976) to refer to an old person. Comparable terms for many other members of the animal kingdom exist in 01.02.06 Animals, but here our world knowledge may not immediately supply the categories. How many modern urban dwellers know that the words teg, hoggerel and thrinter refer to sheep in their first, second and third years respectively, or indeed to sheep at all? Fortunately for the classifier, this information is readily available in the OED.

A further complication lies in the fact that people can happily operate with more than one system of classification. Ask someone what a tomato is, and they are quite likely to reply that it is a type of vegetable, even if they are aware that technically a tomato is a fruit. The clash here is between a folk category, based on the use of the object in our society (we eat it with other vegetables), and a scientific or expert category (fruits have seeds). Since much of English vocabulary came into use before serious classification of the natural world got underway in the eighteenth century, the two systems often have to be juggled in HTOED. Early words for plants, for example, fall more readily into categories such as ‘medicinal’, ‘poisonous’, or ‘yielding a dye’ than they do into a scientific taxonomy. Classifiers have to take account of such duality. In the case of tomatoes, pumpkins, cucumbers, and so on, the solution is a category called Fruits as vegetables.

Categorization is a basic human cognitive skill. We begin in childhood to organize things according to whether they are alike or unalike, and continue this process in adult life. Most of us will impose some sort of order on our material possessions, sorting books by author (or title, or subject, or size …), socks by colour, sweaters by season, and so on – the categories may vary from person to person, but the principle is there. Dictionary definitions often categorize words by reference to other words, as when OED defines sofa as “a form of lounge or couch” or rapier as “a long, thin, sharp-pointed sword”. Such relationships are revealed by proximity in HTOED, which thus constitutes a map of their development of in the history of the English language.

We use words and the categories they represent to impose order on our universe. If we hear the word tree, or hill, or green, very different images of these phenomena may spring to mind. Yet the multitude of trees that an individual may have seen have enough in common to form a category of Trees which is shared by other speakers of the language, and thus enables communication to proceed. (Except, of course, when the categories are fuzzy, as they mostly are, and we start arguing about whether a tree is actually a bush, or a hill qualifies as a mountain, or this particular green is closer to blue or yellow, but that’s a different problem.)

J.R.R. Tolkien’s first job was as an assistant on the staff of the OED, and he later said that he had ‘learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of [his] life.’ In The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, three senior OED editors – Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner – explore more than 100 words found in Tolkien’s fiction, such as ‘hobbit’, ‘attercop’, and ‘precious’. Edmund Weiner has written this original post for OUPblog on Winterfilth (October) and Blotmath (November).

As I write this blog Winterfilth is coming to an end and Blotmath is about to begin. What on earth am I talking about? Well, as the Tolkien enthusiasts out there will know, these are the names that the hobbits used for October and November.

As it happens, although the action of The Lord of the Rings spans October and November (avid readers will remember that a lot of action happens in the one and the other is spent by the hobbits resting in Rivendell), these month names are not used in the story. They are given in an appendix in which Tolkien explains the calendar of the Shire (the land of the hobbits) and the hobbits’ names for the days of the week and the months.

Did Tolkien make these names up? No. Some people will be surprised to learn that he made up none of his ‘English’ words, as opposed to the words of the elvish, dwarvish, and orkish languages. (The one exception, funnily enough, may be the word ‘hobbit’—but the jury on that is still out.) The other strange and archaic-looking words, such as mathom, Arkenstone, eleventy, flet, and barrow-wight, are all based on earlier usage and generally go back either to Anglo-Saxon (Old English, English before the Norman Conquest) or to Old Norse (the language of the Vikings and Sagas).

So what about the months? Tolkien borrowed them for the hobbits from Anglo-Saxon texts that give both the Latin names of the months (the names we use now) and their Old English equivalents. None of the latter seem to have survived the Conquest except (in a different meaning) Yule, and Lide, a now obsolete dialect word for March, which may have meant ‘loud’ (referring to its windiness). Blotmath, or rather Blotmonath or Blodmonath, was the time when in pagan times cattle were sacrificed (blotan ‘sacrifice’ or blod ‘blood’).

And Winterfilth? In Old English this was Winterfylleth, in which fylleth means ‘fulness’, or perhaps ‘full moon’. The word for ‘filth’ was spelt and pronounced differently, but in modern English they would have come to sound the same, and this gave Tolkien an opportunity for one of the scholarly etymological puns to which he was very partial.

Continuing on from our Historical Thesaurus week, I’m delighted to be able to bring you another wonderful original post from Professor Christian Kay, who headed up the project. Today she tells us about one of her favourite sections of the HTOED: kinship. You can read her previous OUPblog post here.

One of my favourite sections for browsing in HTOED is 03.01 Society/the community. As with all sections of HTOED, this one proceeds from general concepts through more specific ones, such as 03.01.01 Kinship/relationship, to the very specific, such as 03.01.01.03.01.03 Mother. (One of our reviewers compared our numbering system to “Scandinavian telephone numbers”, but we find it the best way to keep track of complex hierarchies of ideas.) In addition to the usual fascinating array of words, sections like these reflect hundreds of years of changing social history.

The lists of synonyms show that kinship, and the obligations it imposes, has been important since Anglo-Saxon times. As might be expected, words for basic family relationships have remained stable: modern English words like mother, father, son, daughter, brother, sister can be traced directly back to Old English. However, even in this area there are surprises: the Old English eam has been replaced by French-derived uncle, and there appears to be no word for aunt at all.

While this situation might come as a relief to some – I think particularly of P.G. Wodehouse’s character Bertie Wooster, terrorized by a platoon of formidable aunts – it has a straightforward explanation. If we look down 03.01.01.03.07 Aunt to its sub-categories, we find that there were in fact two Old English words for aunt, denoting a maternal and a paternal aunt respectively. There was also a word for a paternal uncle, and it is possible, though scholars disagree about this, that eam originally meant a maternal uncle. (In HTOED we hedge our bets by putting the word under both Uncle and Maternal Uncle.) Nephews and nieces were also distinguished by the side of the family they belonged to.

Systems like this were common in European languages and still survive in some of them, such as the Scandinavian languages. So why not in English? The answer to this question, as to others about English, is the Norman conquest of 1066, which introduced many French words along with changes in the legal system. One feature of the new system was primogeniture, whereby property passes to the oldest son rather than being divided among all the children. The important line of descent is thus from father to son, with the linguistic effect that there is no longer any great need for terms which distinguish, for example, maternal and paternal uncles. Primogeniture has the advantage of preserving large estates intact, though it may seem unfair in other ways: English novels are full of younger sons who have to make their own way in the world, and of daughters whose marriage prospects are blighted by lack of dowry.

Although some kinship terms are very precise, others are fuzzy in meaning. Here we can think of our own usage, where uncle can mean the husband of one’s aunt or a family friend as well as a blood relation (and other things). A glance at the HTOED index will reveal a similar fuzziness in other terms, such as father-in-law, classified under its original meaning of ‘step-father’, or sister classified with ‘sister-in-law’. Such examples sound a warning for readers of older literature: a word may not always mean what it appears to mean. In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, for example, published in 1813, Mr Darcy has written to his sister, Georgiana, telling her that he is engaged to Elizabeth Bennett. The story continues: “The joy which Miss Darcy expressed on receiving similar information was as sincere as her brother’s in sending it. Four sides of paper were insufficient to contain all her delight, and all her earnest desire of being loved by her sister.”

Why does she use the word sister when she plainly means “sister-in-law”? The explanation may be that people then often lived in bigger groups than we do nowadays; unmarried women would live with their parents, or, failing them, being in need of a male protector, with the family of a brother or a married sister or aunt. There was no need to distinguish between sisters and sisters-in-law in the family circle, so the term sister tended to be used for both relationships. A similar vagueness can be heard nowadays with reference to step-sisters or half-sisters.

Nuggets of social history can also be found by looking at recent additions to the kinship categories. Before the twentieth century, people don’t seem to have found it necessary to distinguish the extended family (first recorded in 1942), since most families were extended. We can also speculate about the factors behind weekend father (1962), or pram-pusher for a young mother (1935). Many terms come in from psychology, such as mother-substitute (1943) or sibling (1903), supplying a gap for a term covering both brother and sister. The range of colloquial, and possibly less respectful, terms for one’s parents also increases, including dad and daddy as early as 1500, American terms like poppa (1897) and paw (1903; also common in Scots), and the rhyming slang pot and pan (= “old man” = “father”) in 1906. Parallel categories for other relatives reveal a similar range of expressions to the kinship browser.

Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe by Stuart Carroll tells the story of three generations of treacherous, bloodthirsty power-brokers. It is the sensational saga of the House of Guise, one of the greatest princely families of the sixteenth century, or indeed of any age. In the short excerpt below, Stuart Carroll talks about the run-up to the infamous Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572.

Paris was not only sixteenth-century Europe’s largest city; it was its first metropolis. To wander the warren of streets behind its medieval walls was to experience such a bustle, noise and stench that it was compared to an entire province. Everywhere the visitor was reminded of its extraordinary Catholic heritage: its 300,000 souls were crammed into nearly 300 streets, divided into 39 parishes and served by 104 churches and monasteries; its conservative and celebrated university was spread over 49 colleges on the city’s Left Bank.

As he left the Louvre at 11 am on Friday 22 August 1572, Gaspard de Coligny paid little attention to his surroundings. He had just attended a council meeting, chaired in the absence of the king and the Queen Mother by the Duke of Anjou, and as he walked along was absorbed in reading an important piece of business. He did not return the hostile looks of the locals. At 55 he was the kingdom’s most experienced politician and soldier and used to the menacing gazes of Catholics. The curious were kept at a distance by a dozen bodyguards. His serious expression, penetrating gaze and white beard lent him a gravity that was out of place amid the gaiety of a rejuvenated court. Even his enemies respected his courage and piety. He was often compared to his contemporary, François de Guise—France’s ‘two shining diamonds’. Better educated than the friend who became his bitterest enemy, he was a good Latinist and maintained a journal (since lost) for posterity. Like Guise, the admiral spread fear among his enemies. There was an uncompromising element in his character which suited him well to Calvinist discipline. In war he knew the value of cruelty and terror as a weapon. To the Protestants this made him a hero, and the leadership was in awe of him. That morning he was making the short walk to his lodgings in the rue de Béthisy. Soon after he turned into the rue des Poulies a single shot rang out from a hundred feet away. Protestants placed their trust in providence for good reason: at the very same moment the shot was fired Coligny stopped and turned suddenly, and the shot missed his vitals, fracturing his left forearm and taking off an index finger. His men immediately rushed to the house from where the shot had been fired and tried to force the door, but the assassin had planned well. The house had a rear door that opened onto the square in front of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois church, where a horse was awaiting him.

Coligny was not killed by the bullet; he would have lived. And yet within forty-eight hours he was murdered. Several days of anarchy followed in which between at least 2,000, and perhaps as many as 6,000, Protestants were butchered. Upwards of 600 houses were pillaged. The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre is the greatest imponderable of sixteenth-century history. The barbarity with which defenceless women and children were massacred has echoes of the horrors of the twentieth century—horrors that were literally unspeakable: such was the cruelty and terror of those August days that very few were ever able to set down in words what they had seen or experienced. The task of the historian is made all the more difficult because the sources that survive, written amid the confusion or put together much later in an attempt to shift the blame, are even more than usually partial and suspect. Over the centuries a plethora of suspects and motives have been put forward. Older interpretations rested on Catherine’s reputation as a wicked Italian Queen schooled in the dark political arts of Machiavelli. Coligny’s assassination, it is claimed, had been planned years before and was the signal for a premeditated programme of extermination. Catherine [de Medici], it is claimed, was driven insane by maternal jealousy. Coligny was increasingly powerful at court and threatened to supplant her in her son’s affections, and so she employed the Guise to eliminate the admiral. This conjecture relies more on xenophobia and misogyny than hard evidence. In fact, the evidence for Coligny’s pre-eminence is rather thin: in the year before his death he was at court for a total of only five weeks. In a major reinterpretation in 1973, Nicola Sutherland argued that an assassination was inconsistent with Catherine’s larger political aims. Catherine had spent more than ten years trying to preserve the peace by balancing the Catholic and Protestant factions, and there is little reason to believe that she would suddenly abandon these consistently held policies and order the death of the Protestant leader, let alone a more general policy of extermination. If not Catherine, then who? Sutherland claimed to have uncovered an international Catholic conspiracy, involving Spain, the Papacy, and the Guise. The Spanish scenario is plausible. In the summer of 1572 Coligny was pressing for immediate intervention in the Low Countries. Philip II of Spain and the Duke of Alva wished him dead. Once again, however, the evidence is flimsy. Spanish policy was tempered by realpolitik, recognizing that the admiral was a force for division and therefore contributed to France’s present weakness. There are other suspects and motives: the Duke of Anjou, the Italians on the council, or a combination of the two—all have their accusers. Charles IX has recently been rehabilitated as an idealistic philosopher-king who, fearing that his dream of concord was about to be shattered, played a decisive role in planning Coligny’s murder. Fresh clues have been gleaned from the prosaic (rising grain prices) to the esoteric (the neoplatonic environment of the court). One benefit of recent research has been to uncouple the plot to kill Coligny from the general massacre that followed. Few historians would now argue that the plotters had a premeditated plan to murder thousands. In order to understand the Massacre we must first answer the riddle of Coligny’s death. Only then will we begin to uncover the link between aristocratic conspiracy and mob violence.

By the time that you read this, fair readers, I will be on my way home to Glasgow for the weekend to see my mum. I’m very excited. However, for those of you stuck at your desks, allow me to entertain you with some of my favourite recent blog posts and articles.

Sad news for the BBC Radio 4 listeners amongst us: Norman Painter, who has been the voice of Phil Archer since The Archers began in 1950, has died at the age of 85.

How important is similar taste in books in a relationship?

According to recent research, literacy  changes the structure of the brain.

Maurice Sendak tells parents worried by Where the Wild Things Are to ‘go to hell’.

A dog from Shropshire has been named the world’s oldest. Atta boy Otto!

The battle for Jack Kerouac’s estate.

Philip Stone of The Bookseller on books by celebrities.

Queen Victoria’s celebrity hippo.

A vexed owl. The second-last photo is my favourite.

An article celebrating 50 years of Asterix.

Professor Christian Kay joined the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary project in 1969, working on it right up to publication this month. In this original post, she reflects on the successes and challenges of forty years’ work on this amazing feat of scholarship.

Click here to read more OUPblog posts on the HTOED.

Publication of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) took place on 22nd October 2009. It was celebrated by a party at Glasgow University, where the project was developed, attended by over 100 people. I was proud to be one of them.

The project was started in 1965 by Professor M. L. Samuels, who, at the age of 89, was present at the party and gave a short talk. Also on the platform was another founder member, Professor Jane Roberts, who supplemented our Oxford English Dictionary-based data with material from Old English (c700 to 1150 AD) not included in the OED. The quartet of editors was completed by Irené Wotherspoon and myself, both of whom joined the project in 1969, as Research Assistants funded by the Leverhulme Trust. By that time, Irené was completing the first postgraduate thesis based on Historical Thesaurus materials, A Notional Classification of Two Parts of English Lexis.

The appointment of Irené and myself was a significant departure for the project in that it was an acknowledgment that it would never be completed without full-time assistance – originally it had been conceived as a research activity for teaching staff and graduate students. We settled down with our volumes of the OED and our packets of paper slips to compile data for inclusion in the thesaurus. My first letter was L, which contains some very challenging words, such as ‘lay’ and ‘lie’, whose meanings I had to distribute around the semantic categories of the work.

The 1970’s brought other challenges. Michael Samuels and I started working on a system of classification suited to large amounts of historical data, and we began recruiting doctoral students to work on specific sections of data, such as Religion or Goodness. We also faced a situation which was to become horribly familiar: running out of money. My job became part-time, and I supplemented my income by freelance work for publishers and writing textbooks. The situation was saved for me in 1979, when I became a full-time lecturer in the English Language Department. Irené had already departed for the south of England, where she raised three children and continued to work freelance for HTOED.

The downside of having a more secure job (‘at last’, said my family) was having less time for project work. In addition to my new role as a teacher, I found myself increasingly involved with thesaurus administration. We took our first tentative steps into computing at the urging of OUP, who wanted the project delivered electronically, and I spent much time in mutually uncomprehending discussions with computing experts. I also developed skills in fund-raising and people management: in the 1980’s we began to take on trainee lexicographers and typists to do preliminary classification and data entry. When Professor Samuels retired in 1989, I took over the administration completely.

The ever-present question, asked repeatedly by funders, University authorities, and OUP, was “When will the project be finished?” This was a difficult question to answer, and involved such arcane skills as calculating the number of slips to a filing drawer, multiplying by the number of drawers, and working out the percentage completed in relation to the total in the OED. We came close to finishing in the early 1980’s, when we completed slip-making for the first edition of the OED, but by that time OUP had started producing supplements, and then a second edition, so we ploughed on, combining slip-making with classification. For the remaining years of the project, funding became easier, and we were able to employ both full-time assistants and graduate students on a part-time basis. Overall, I calculate that about 230 people played an active part in the project during its 44-year history.

Over the past few weeks, various people (mainly journalists) have asked me “Why did it take so long?” The answer is partly that we never had enough money, but also that work of this kind requires a good deal of careful human input. If you are faced with, say, 10,000 slips containing words which have something to do with Food or Music, arriving at an acceptable classification is not the work of a few hours.

Classification and data entry proceeded through the 1990’s and early 2000’s, with glimmers of light occasionally visible at the end of the tunnel. One highlight of this period was the publication in 1995 of A Thesaurus of Old English by Jane Roberts and myself, which proved that we could at least finish something. Another was my promotion to a professorship in 1996. However, the best moment of all came on 29th September 2008, when the disk containing the final text went off to OUP, followed in August 2009, after a tough period of proofreading, by the appearance in Glasgow of the first copy of HTOED.

Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. His new book, Ancient Greece: A History in Eleven Cities, provides a highly original introduction to ancient Greece that takes the city as its starting point. He uses the history of eleven cities – out of over a thousand – to illuminate the most important and informative aspects of Greek history. In the original post below, Professor Cartledge talks about the recent publicity surrounding his claim that the ancient Greeks introduced the grape-vine and viticulture to what is today’s South of France.

Recently I have been interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s flagship ‘Today’ programme, on the BBC World Service, on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire (my local station), and by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The cause of all this interest? The claim that it was the ancient Greeks who introduced the grape-vine and viticulture to what is today’s South of France in around 600 BC (E). That was when Greeks from ancient Phocaea, a city that sits today on Turkey’s Aegean shore, founded the city of Massalia – which has ultimately evolved into contemporary Marseille(s).

This is just one illustration of two major points. First, that ‘ancient Greece’ was not any one country or nation-state but a cultural conglomerate – ‘Hellas’ in ancient Greek – stretching from Spain in the West to Georgia in the East and unified not by politics but by commerce and custom, especially religious custom. Second, that this enlarged Ancient Greece had – and still has – such an impact on our modern western world partly precisely because it was so enlarged.

Altogether ancient ‘Hellas’ – a cultural concept like medieval ‘Christendom’ or ‘the Arab world’ today – comprised around 1000 different Hellenic communities at any one time between say 600 BC(E) and AD (or CE) 300. Besides Massalia, there are Cnossos (where the earliest examples of Greek writing are attested, datable about 1400 BCE), Mycenae (’rich in gold’, as Homer calls it), Argos, Miletus, Sparta, Athens, Syracuse, Thebes, Alexandria, and Byzantion (which in CE 324 became Constantinople, and later, much later, after both the Ottoman conquest and the founding of the modern Turkish Republic, Istanbul).

The ultimate origins of Cotes du Rhone is not perhaps the most earth-shattering issue for most of us today, though for the ancient Greeks it was not just what wine you drank, a matter of taste, but how you drank it (with what admixture of water) that counted – a matter of civilisation that divided Greeks from all non-Greeks. But the role of ancient Alexandria (the one in Egypt) as allegedly the ‘birthplace of the modern world’, as one recent book on the city founded by Alexander the Great in 331 would have it, is no trivial issue at all. For if you consider its outbreaks of (pagan) antisemitism (or judeophobia) and of Christian fundamentalist fanaticism (that resulted in the murder of Hypatia in AD 415, say), you would have reluctantly to answer ‘yes’. On the other hand, much more cheeringly, you would give the same answer if you were looking for the birthplace of scholarship (in the Museum and Library) and were considering numerous astonishing pioneering achievements in science, literary criticism and technology (the polymath Eratosthenes, the maths genius Archimedes, and the geographer Claudius Ptolemy all worked here, and it was here too that the steepling multistorey Pharos lighthouse was constructed in the 3rd century BCE, a genuine Wonder of the Ancient World).

Massalia, though, did not only merit inclusion because it was through there that the grapevine was first introduced to the south of France. It was also the birthplace of the man who ‘discovered’ Britain (and a great deal besides) in about 300 BCE, one Pytheas. And similarly horizon-expanding feats with major contemporary resonance and relevance can be identified in every one of the eleven ancient cities selected to represent ‘Ancient Greece’. It is a privilege as well as a pleasure for me as Cambridge’s endowed A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture to investigate and celebrate critically our ancient cultural ancestors in this and other ways. There is no peace for wicked Cambridge Classics dons.

By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK
Today sees the long-awaited publication of The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Conceived and compiled by the English Language Department of the University of Glasgow, and based on the Oxford English Dictionary, it is the result of 44 years of scholarly labour. The HTOED is a groundbreaking analysis of the historical inventory of English, allowing users to find words connected in meaning throughout the history of the language in a way that has never before been possible.

Kicking off some wonderful posts on the HTOED, here are some fun facts and figures about this incredible work.  Be sure to check back all week to learn more!

* At just under 4,000 pages, the HTOED is the largest thesaurus in the world. It covers approximately 800,000 word meanings from Old English to the present day.

* The HTOED provides a breadth of knowledge that is found in no other work, and has more synonyms than any other thesaurus. The word immediately, for example, has 265 synonyms, ranging from ædre, which is only found in Old English, to yesterday, which is first recorded as being used in the sense of immediately in 1974.

* It uses an entirely new thematic system of classification, with a detailed meaning structure that distinguishes between true synonyms and closely related words.

* There are approximately 800,000 meanings within the HTOED

* The largest category in the HTOED is “immediately” with 265 meanings

* The HTOED took 44 years to complete (started in 1965, published in 2009)

* In total, 230 people have worked on the project

* It’s taken approximately 320,000 hours to complete the HTOED – that’s the equivalent of 176 years

* The project has cost approximately £1.1million ($1.8million) – roughly 75p ($1.25) per meaning

* The project faced its most significant challenge in 1978 when the building the project was housed in caught fire. The entire archive of paper slips that were used to record each entry were very nearly destroyed. They were only saved because they were in boxes inside metal filing cabinets.

* During the 1980s the Old English material was entered into electronic databases developed in London. The UK government sponsored a programme to train people in editing and data entry skills. The trainees helped to edit and input the bulk of the HTOED data into an electronic system.

* With financial straits being an ever-present backdrop, one team-member, perhaps with excessive zeal, worked out how many pages of the OED could be recorded by a slip-maker within the lifetime of a single pencil (answer: 130)