Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary Your price : £ 275 . 00 Sold out Edited by Christian Kay , Jane Roberts , Michael Samuels and Irené Wotherspoon . Two volumes . Sewn cloth binding . Presented in a buckram slipcase . 3 , 952 pages . 11 ¼" x 8 ¾". Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionarywith additional material from A Thesaurus of Old EnglishThe first reference work of its kind in any language . ‘ The ultimate volume for the word fetishist ’ NEW YORKER BOOK BENCH ‘ I can hardly imagine any reference book more valuable … here is the information we had to spend hours hunting down through the thickets of the OED , shot , stuffed and mounted for us . ’ PHILIP PULLMAN , author of His Dark Materials ‘ No words of mine can express the magnificence of this monument to our huge and often beautiful language ’ ELSPETH BARKER , Literary ReviewThe product of decades of research and scholarship , the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is a unique new resource charting the full semantic development of English . It is the first historical thesaurus ever produced for any language , containing almost every major word in English from Old English to modern colloquial terms . This unrivalled analysis of English provides a fascinating picture of the development of the language and will be of interest to historians , linguists , philologists , writers and lovers of words . For the very first time , information that was previously locked away in the alphabetical structure of the Oxford English Dictionary is now made easily accessible . Scholars or writers , for example , wishing to reconstruct the vocabulary of a certain period previously needed to look up synonyms of individual words in a thesaurus and then trace their history separately in the OED . The Historical Thesaurus collects subjects together ( e . g . ‘ existence in time and space ’) and then within each individual entry ( e . g . ‘ create / make / bring about ’) organises synonyms in chronological order , giving dates of usage . ‘ Every line generates fresh insights . It is at once awe - inspiring , humbling , motivating , moving . It actually made me gasp with amazement – and I mean out loud – several times , and I can ’ t recall lexicology doing that to me before ! It ’ s amazing how these entries make you feel so much closer to the history of the language than was previously possible . The OED gave us individual trees , but never a sight of the whole forest or helpful pathways through it . The thesaurus does precisely that . It heralds a new era in the historical study of English ’ DAVID CRYSTALThis huge project was conceived by the Department of English Language of the University of Glasgow where dedicated teams have spent over forty years in its making . The result is the largest thesaurus resource in the world , covering more than 920 , 000 words and meanings , arranged in thousands of categories under three broad sections : the world , the mind and society . You will find an abundance of etymological delights : to talk idly has ‘ waeflian ’ as its Old English form ( perhaps leading to today ’ s ‘ waffle ’), ‘ chatter ’ was around in the 13 th century , while to ‘ tinkle ’ or ‘ whiffle ’ enjoyed a rather more short - lived usage in the 17 th and 18 th centuries . This remarkable new work has won widespread praise from journalists and authors around the English speaking world . ‘ I am one of those who is intrigued by the way in which language evolves . To see the development of the English language set out in this way will bring endless pleasure to any lover of words . This work is , quite simply , fascinating ’ ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH ‘ I ’ ve been waiting nearly all my life for a book like this – as it turns out , literally ! I am thrilled that the Historical Thesaurus is now a reality . The only problem is that I may dive in and never come out again . This is a word lover ’ s dream ’ BARBARA KINGSOLVER ‘ Here is a work in which you can lose yourself and find your language . The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is so thorough and readable that it resembles other thesauri in name only . Finally the OED has a worthy counterpart ’ AMMON SHEA , author of Reading the OED