巨型同义词词典即将问世

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It's the world's first historical thesaurus, grouping words by meaning and by date. And it survived fire, lack of funds and the death of some of its founders.

Tomorrow the work will finally be unveiled to academics prior to its publication in October.

Professor Christian Kay of the University of Glasgow began work on the project as a 28-year-old research assistant. She's now 69 and thinks it will be invaluable to scholars not just of linguistics but of cultural and social history.

Professor Kay:

"You know, if you're interested in something like clothes, it's very interesting to see what people have been wearing for the last 1,300 years. So I was looking at a whole list of words to do with trousers and there were words that would never have occurred to you probably that these words meant trousers."

That's where a thesaurus beats a dictionary, she says. But it's much harder work to compile. In the early days they simply wrote the words on slips of paper and grouped them in different ways.

Professor Kay remembers the dreadful day when the building caught fire and they nearly lost ten years' work. Fortunately the slips were in metal filing cabinets and survived.

Now all that work, and all those words, can be shared with the world.

Glossary 词汇表

funds资金
founders创建人
unveiled揭开面纱
academics学者
prior to在...之前
invaluable无价的
linguistics语言学
compile编纂
slips of纸张
in metal filing cabinets在金属文件柜里