World's largest thesaurus launched
English language experts have spent more than 45 years compiling the world's largest thesaurus.It contains nearly 800,000 meanings, organised into more than 236,000 categories and subcategories collected together over 4,500 pages.
The project began in 1964 when Professor Michael Samuels set out to map almost every word in English language with words with similar meaning are grouped together and listed in chronological order.
Since then hundreds of research assistants, postgraduate students, volunteers and staff from Glasgow University have spent thousands of hours helping to produce the books.
We can't help but wonder how many of those hours were taken up by people looking for synonyms of the word'bored'.
Professor Christian Kay, one of four editors on the project, said: "The difference between our thesaurus and Roget's Thesaurus is that we go right back to the beginnings of English.
"So that, in addition to getting the words arranged by their meanings, we provide the dates during which they were current in English. We include obsolete words which are no longer in use or are only found in very special contexts.
"Words have different survival rates, so there are maybe 7,000 words which have been in English since the very early days and there are other words that maybe only lasted for a few years."
LINKS
Glasgow University
"So that, in addition to getting the words arranged by their meanings, we provide the dates during which they were current in English. We include obsolete words which are no longer in use or are only found in very special contexts.
"Words have different survival rates, so there are maybe 7,000 words which have been in English since the very early days and there are other words that maybe only lasted for a few years."
LINKS
Glasgow University
