Book Review : Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels & Irene Wotherspoon (eds.), Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. With additional material from A Thesaurus of Old English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN-10 0–19-920899–9, ISBN-13 978–0-19–920899-9.

The Historical thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary represents a re-arrangement of the contents of the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED2) by meaning. Three different versions of this re-classification are available: the published book (HTOED), a version adapted for use in conjunction with the OED Online (HTOED3) and sampled sections pre-published on the University of Glasgow website. This review will focus on the hard-copy publication, but will also discuss the incorporation of HTOED3 into the OED Online and compare these two classifications with the earlier classifications of vocabulary found in John Wilkins’ Essay towards a real character and a philosophical language (1668) and in Peter Mark Roget’s Thesaurus of English words and phrases (Roget 1852; Roget & Lloyd 1984). [Taken from introduction]