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Our Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary expert, Professor Christian Kay, blogs about the numerous press enquiries and interviews in the wake of the HTOED’s publication.

To read more about the HTOED click here.

An unexpected outcome of the publication of HTOED was the interest it generated in both UK and overseas media. On the whole, encounters with the press have been an enjoyable experience, and they’ve done us proud with articles, reviews, and interviews, but sometimes I find myself conning over the less flattering words for members of the journalistic profession (hack, penciller, tripe-hound, ink-slinger, creeper, thumb-sucker, press gang), and plotting my revenge.

So what interests the media? I learned to carry with me at all times a list of ‘favourite words’ to distribute on request. During the final stages of the project, I had asked the proofreaders to keep an eye open for anything suitable – unfortunately what they considered entertaining was often not what one would want to spell out over the phone or see in a family newspaper. However, I managed to offload such rare gems as spanghew ‘to cause a frog or toad to rise in the air’ (unfortunately mis-spelled as it whizzed round the world), purfle ‘to decorate with a purfle’, and ostrobogulous ‘indecent, somewhat bizarre’. I’m still waiting for a victim for Old English paddanieg ‘an island with frogs on it’ or weirding peas, a Scottish term for peas employed in divination.

Anecdotes were much in demand. Fortunately, we had one anecdote to cap them all, the Great Fire of 1978, when the building housing the project went on fire (as Glaswegians disingenuously say). At that time, all our research was contained in a single set of paper slips, which luckily were housed in metal cabinets and escaped unscathed. Recounting this for the twentieth time, it was tempting to embellish the narrative, rescuing screaming infants, or at least professors, from the flames rather than smouldering volumes of the OED.

Human interest questions varied in subtlety: “how many years have you worked on the project”, “how old were you when you started”, or simply, “how old are you?” Colleagues threatened to get me a badge like the ones children have on their birthdays, emblazoned with ‘I am 69’ to forestall such questions. Many reporters seemed to find it incredible that anyone would work on a project for 44 years, as several of us did. Some hinted that this was at the expense of a more fulfilling life, but I was nevertheless startled that in 2009 a newspaper would produce a headline describing me as a “lingo-loving spinster”, and one, moreover, who “coyly confessed” to celebrating publication with a glass of champagne.

I am not really a morning person, so the number of breakfast radio programmes requesting live (or fairly live) interviews was something of a trial (unless they were in Australia, which was fine, as the interviews took place in the evening). On publication day, I set off at 6.30 a.m. for the BBC headquarters in Glasgow, and by 7.45 had chatted brightly to four radio stations. At that point a colleague and I were handed a news story about an Australian golf course and asked to ‘translate’ it using HTOED synonyms, thus providing an uplifting finale to the programme at 8.55. HTOED does not abound in synonyms for the creatures which apparently haunt Australian golf courses, such as kangaroos, camels, dingos, and hairy-nosed wombats. We felt that we had done pretty well to produce boomers, ships of the desert, warrigals, and hirsute-nebbed badgers. Then we returned to campus to deal with three television crews.

One learned to be tolerant of minor inaccuracies (OED is a dictionary, OUP is a publisher; HTOED contains 800,000 different meanings, not 800,000 different words). Often I longed to launch into my first-year lectures on the history of the English language, while refusing even to attempt to answer such questions as “What is the oldest word in English?”

The closing question was often on the lines of “What are you going to do now?” as if life had come to a stop when the last slip was entered in the database (by coincidence, or careful planning, the last slip was the word thesaurus itself). One interviewer had thought this through, however, taking due account of age and gender, and asked: “And now you’ve finished, have you got something else you’d like to get back to, like your garden, or a big piece of knitting?” I’d like to put it on record that I do not have, and never have had, “a big piece of knitting”.

Professor Christian Kay joined the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary project in 1969, working on it right up to publication this month. In this original post, she reflects on the successes and challenges of forty years’ work on this amazing feat of scholarship.

Click here to read more OUPblog posts on the HTOED.

Publication of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) took place on 22nd October 2009. It was celebrated by a party at Glasgow University, where the project was developed, attended by over 100 people. I was proud to be one of them.

The project was started in 1965 by Professor M. L. Samuels, who, at the age of 89, was present at the party and gave a short talk. Also on the platform was another founder member, Professor Jane Roberts, who supplemented our Oxford English Dictionary-based data with material from Old English (c700 to 1150 AD) not included in the OED. The quartet of editors was completed by Irené Wotherspoon and myself, both of whom joined the project in 1969, as Research Assistants funded by the Leverhulme Trust. By that time, Irené was completing the first postgraduate thesis based on Historical Thesaurus materials, A Notional Classification of Two Parts of English Lexis.

The appointment of Irené and myself was a significant departure for the project in that it was an acknowledgment that it would never be completed without full-time assistance – originally it had been conceived as a research activity for teaching staff and graduate students. We settled down with our volumes of the OED and our packets of paper slips to compile data for inclusion in the thesaurus. My first letter was L, which contains some very challenging words, such as ‘lay’ and ‘lie’, whose meanings I had to distribute around the semantic categories of the work.

The 1970’s brought other challenges. Michael Samuels and I started working on a system of classification suited to large amounts of historical data, and we began recruiting doctoral students to work on specific sections of data, such as Religion or Goodness. We also faced a situation which was to become horribly familiar: running out of money. My job became part-time, and I supplemented my income by freelance work for publishers and writing textbooks. The situation was saved for me in 1979, when I became a full-time lecturer in the English Language Department. Irené had already departed for the south of England, where she raised three children and continued to work freelance for HTOED.

The downside of having a more secure job (‘at last’, said my family) was having less time for project work. In addition to my new role as a teacher, I found myself increasingly involved with thesaurus administration. We took our first tentative steps into computing at the urging of OUP, who wanted the project delivered electronically, and I spent much time in mutually uncomprehending discussions with computing experts. I also developed skills in fund-raising and people management: in the 1980’s we began to take on trainee lexicographers and typists to do preliminary classification and data entry. When Professor Samuels retired in 1989, I took over the administration completely.

The ever-present question, asked repeatedly by funders, University authorities, and OUP, was “When will the project be finished?” This was a difficult question to answer, and involved such arcane skills as calculating the number of slips to a filing drawer, multiplying by the number of drawers, and working out the percentage completed in relation to the total in the OED. We came close to finishing in the early 1980’s, when we completed slip-making for the first edition of the OED, but by that time OUP had started producing supplements, and then a second edition, so we ploughed on, combining slip-making with classification. For the remaining years of the project, funding became easier, and we were able to employ both full-time assistants and graduate students on a part-time basis. Overall, I calculate that about 230 people played an active part in the project during its 44-year history.

Over the past few weeks, various people (mainly journalists) have asked me “Why did it take so long?” The answer is partly that we never had enough money, but also that work of this kind requires a good deal of careful human input. If you are faced with, say, 10,000 slips containing words which have something to do with Food or Music, arriving at an acceptable classification is not the work of a few hours.

Classification and data entry proceeded through the 1990’s and early 2000’s, with glimmers of light occasionally visible at the end of the tunnel. One highlight of this period was the publication in 1995 of A Thesaurus of Old English by Jane Roberts and myself, which proved that we could at least finish something. Another was my promotion to a professorship in 1996. However, the best moment of all came on 29th September 2008, when the disk containing the final text went off to OUP, followed in August 2009, after a tough period of proofreading, by the appearance in Glasgow of the first copy of HTOED.