BBC英语口语:Historical Thesaurus 巨型历代同义词词典

Background: Enormous, capacious, skelping 还有 vast – 这些词语仅仅是单词 large 在即将发行的，迄今最大的同义词词典里289个同意词语里的几个代表。Thesaurus 意思是同义词词典。The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary 里共有词语60万条历代词语，这些词语是按照日期和意思来分类的。经过40余年的整理编写后，这本巨型同义词词典即将问世。

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Historical Thesaurus to be Published

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.