Professor Christian Kay, Research Grant
In what situation would you need a muffling-cheat? Maybe when eating a maid of honour on a muffin?
The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is crammed full of information about the development of the English Language.
The thesaurus has taken 45 years to put together and contains 800,000 word meanings representing the English vocabulary from Old English (c.700 A.D.) to the present. Split into three major sections: the external world; the mental world; and the social world, the words are arranged according to their meanings and dates of use. If you want to know when grimalkins were popular pets, or what you might do in a tosh, then the Historical Thesaurus has the answers.
The AHRC funded the final stages of the project, bringing the Thesaurus to completion and publication. During the project the team at Glasgow University, led initially by Professor Michael Samuels and from 1989 by Professor Christian Kay, have been visited by over 50 international researchers from as far afield as Japan, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Canada, the United States and Europe. Requests for data have come not only from researchers but also educational psychologists and students. Subjects requested include leisure and sociability, cookery, madness, animals, pride, baptism, politeness, death, emotions, marriage, pain and seaweed.
As Christian explains: ‘The research version of the Historical Thesaurus is now available online, enabling searches of particular sections, ranging from food to music, warfare to education, or more targeted searches such as the terms used for trumpet. It is also possible to search by choosing particular dates or date ranges, such as all words with a first occurrence between 1450-1650, as well as stylistic labels such as slang or Scots.’
A printed version, enabling entire sections to be viewed at once, is being published by the Oxford University Press in October 2009 . As well as being a source of information for scholars and the general public, the Historical Thesaurus will enable us to continue our understanding of how our everyday language has developed and evolved from the language our ancestors used, as the royalties from the book will be devoted to research in the English language by Glasgow University.
Glossary
Muffling-cheat: a napkin or serviette (1567)
Maid of honour: cheese-cake (1769)
Muffin: dish or plate (1864)
Grimalkin: domestic cat (1630)
Tosh: bath (1883)
Image credit: www.istockphoto.com/ohdub