Friday, October 23, 2009

Thesauruses, Dictionaries and Dachshunds

I've an assortment of lexicography news to share this morning:
Henry Hitchings, author of The Secret Life of Words and Defining the World has written an enthusiastic review of Oxford's new Historical Thesaurus of the English Language, which he calls "a monumental feat of scholarship [and] in a world infatuated with speed, ... a testament to the value of patiently accumulated learning." To read the rest of the article, visit the Telegraph at http://tinyurl.com/yz8ds2z.

Here's a wonderful photograph from the Boston Globe, illustrating an article on the Boston Book Festival. The photo, "Dictionary," is part of a series by photographer and MassArt teacher Abelardo Morell. The photos are collected in A Book of Books, Bulfinch Press, 2002.



And then there's this happy tale from aptly named El Dorado, Kansas: On Sunday, Michael Myers scratched off one or two Bonus Crossword instant tickets and found he'd won a top prize of $20,000. “I wanted to hide the ticket until I could claim it, so I put it in my dictionary under ‘M’ for ‘money,’” Myers revealed. “And then I put the dictionary up high. Doxies like to chew and I wasn’t going to take any chances.” (See the full story The El Dorado Times at http://tinyurl.com/yh2eeog).

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Thursday, October 22, 2009

Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary


Today marks the official launch of the largest thesaurus resource in the world, covering more than 920,000 words and meanings, based on the Oxford English Dictionary. Editors Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels and Irene Wotherspoon have compiled the first historical thesaurus for any of the world's languages. It lists synonyms with the dates of first recorded use in English, in chronological order, with earliest synonyms first.

For more information on the thesaurus, visit Oxford UP's website at http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Reference/?view=usa&ci=9780199208999.

Forty-four years in the making!

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Monday, July 6, 2009

Oxford Historical Thesaurus Update


Here's an article from the Times about the thesaurus; in Bloomington we heard a series of fascinating presentations on this monumental work. Visit the Times Online at http://tinyurl.com/qednzx.

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