Words in Time and Place: Exploring Language through the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary

To someone with a pet hate of anachronisms in historical fiction, linguist David Crystal's introduction to the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) is an irresistible temptation. Published in 2009, the two-volume Historical Thesaurus (Kay, 2009) (RR 2011/027) is “the first comprehensive thesaurus to arrange words by meaning in order of first recorded use”, listing over 800,000 words in 235,000 categories. With rather less words (90,000), though no less instructive, this entertaining taster condenses both the HTOED and the English language into 15 popular themes, including light meals and heavy drinking, terms of...