A Thesaurus of Old English

Jane Roberts

doi:10.1163/18756719-12340234

Abstract

Abstract The Thesaurus of Old English (TOE), first published in 1995, had its origins in a body of slips derived from standard dictionaries, principally the Clark Hall and Merritt Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary and the Bosworth-Toller volumes. These slips were made to supply the Glasgow Historical Thesaurus (HT) project (1965–2009) with a firmer idea of the range and totality of Old English vocabulary than available in the OED. In 1976 the decision was taken to deploy the Old English materials as a pilot thesaurus for the HT. With compilation of the slips completed in 1982, researchers were able to begin sorting the slips into groupings based on meaning and to see areas of the HT classification take shape in miniature. The TOE data, absorbed into the larger structure of its parent project, allow us to view English words that disappeared by 1150 alongside those that continued in use.

Highlights

The story of A Thesaurus of Old English (TOE) begins in 1965, when Michael Samuels announced the Historical Thesaurus (HT) project at a meeting of the Philological Society in London, a project to be undertaken by members of the English Language department at the University of Glasgow (Samuels, 1965: 40)
Once the slips moved into groupings based on meaning, their relationship to particular dictionary headwords would be lost, and I needed an alphabetic record of the slips—in Glasgow, the HT compilers ticked Oxford English Dictionary (OED) entries as each slip was made, but the varied materials from which I extracted word senses had made such a simple procedure impossible
Would it be possible to supply some etymological information, say flag with c words that have cognates in other Germanic languages? If Latin loan words were flagged by superscript l, cl could flag Latin words likely to have been absorbed into common Germanic before the Anglo-Saxons got to England; wall, a word much in the news at present, would have the flag c but l as well

Summary

Introduction

Once the slips moved into groupings based on meaning, their relationship to particular dictionary headwords would be lost, and I needed an alphabetic record of the slips—in Glasgow, the HT compilers ticked OED entries as each slip was made, but the varied materials from which I extracted word senses had made such a simple procedure impossible. My computing colleagues furnished me with nine microfiches, giving both alphabetical and numerical checklists, the latter a skeleton Old English thesaurus according to broad Roget groupings. This was the HT project’s first overview of thesaurus materials (Roberts and Brown, 1982).. The most striking modifications of the HT classification are summarized roughly in Table 2, which gives a flavour of some of the major changes made (see Table 2)

11 Aesthetics 12 Volition

Findings

Conclusion