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By: Lana,
on 2/24/2010
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By Anatoly Liberman
Neologists, thesauruses, and etymology. A month ago, one of our correspondents asked what we call people who coin new words. I suggested that such wordsmiths or wordmen may be called neologists. My spellchecker did not like this idea and offered geologist or enologist for neologist, but I did not listen to its advice. Geologists study rocks, and (o)enologists are experts in wine making. Mountains and alcohol are for the young; I have enough trouble keeping my identity among entomologists (the motif of an insect will turn up again at the end of this post). Soon after my answer was posted, a letter came from Marc Alexander, a colleague teaching in Glasgow. He was a member of the team that produced the great Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (this is only part of the title) that Oxford University Press brought out in 2009. He kindly looked up the relevant category in the thesaurus and found the following: logodaedalus (current between 1641 and 1690), logodaedalist (it lived in books between 1721-1806), neologist (which surfaced in 1785 and is still alive), neoterist, and verbarian, coined in 1785 and 1873 respectively, all in all a nice gallery of stillborn freaks. Mr. Alexander adds: “Based on OED citations, neologist is, I think, exclusively one who uses rather one who coins [new words].”
I would like to profit by this opportunity and thank all our readers who comment on my posts (I wish there were more of them) and in addition say something about the role of thesauruses for etymology. When the first volumes of the OED, at that time called NED (New English Dictionary) reached the public, two attitudes clashed, and the polemic was carried out with the acerbity typical of such exchanges in the 18th and the 19th century. (Those who have never read newspapers and popular and semi-popular magazines published in Addison’s days and much later have no idea how virulent their style often was. Both James A.H. Murray and Walter W. Skeat represented the trend in an exemplary way and never missed the chance of calling their opponents benighted, ludicrously uninformed, and unworthy of even the shortest rejoinder; then a long diatribe would usually follow.) Some people praised Murray for including all the words that occurred in printed sources, while others objected to filling the pages of the great national dictionary with obstructive rubbish: they would never have allowed logodaedalist and its likes to mar the pages of a serious reference book. No convincing arguments for or against either position exist. The public will not notice the presence of logodaedalist or use this preposterous word, but those who are interested in the sources of human creativity, for whom language history is not only a list of survivors (be it sounds, forms, syntactic constructions, or words) but a chronicle of battles won and lost will be perennially grateful to the OED for documenting even the words that lived briefly. Such words show how English-speakers have tried to master their language for more than a millennium, and the picture is inspiring from beginning to end.
Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary… (two handsome volumes) is a great book, a monumental achievement, a truly bright feather in OUP’s cap. It will serve as an inestimable tool in etymological work. When we ask the often unanswerable question about the connection between what seems to be an arbitrary group of sounds (“sign”) and meaning, sometimes our only guide or supporting evidence is analogy. I will use a typical example from my work. The origin of basket (from C
By: Kirsty,
on 11/26/2009
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In her final OUPblog post, Professor Christian Kay from the Historical Dictionary of the Oxford English Dictionary team talks about words concerning sound in the HTOED.
More posts about the Historical Thesaurus can be found here.
By far the largest category of words in HTOED denoting the traditional five senses is the one for Hearing, including the sounds that we hear. It has around 7350 headings and meanings compared with 4800 for Sight, 1100 each for Taste and Smell, and a mere 500 for Touch. Perhaps this reflects the importance of hearing to our ancestors: sight was useful mainly during the daylight hours, but sound could warn of danger at any time.
A trawl through section 01.03.08 Hearing certainly reveals the care with which we describe the noises made both by our environment and by ourselves. Noises can be loud (fervent, perstreperous, clamant, strepitous, dinsome) or soft (murmurous, whistering, susurrant). They can be resonant or ringing (sonorous, tinging, clanging) or dull (thud, thrump, pob, whump). They represent sounds in nature such as the suffling of the wind, the buzzing of bees, the splashing, sloshing, and sploshing of water, and even what HTOED discreetly describes as ‘Sounds heard in body’. And that is by no means all. Sounds with specific meanings also pop up in other categories, such as Animals, Music, and Language.
If we check back to the etymologies of such words in OED, we find that many of them, such as clank, hiss, and clip-clop, are described as ‘echoic’ or ‘imitative’, that is they are an attempt to use human language to mimic natural sounds. Many of them are somewhat repetitive: starting around 1385, making a rolling sound was described as to rumble, jumble, thumble, humble, grumble, or strumble. The sound itself might be called grolling, hurling, blumbering, and, uniquely latinate, volutation. On the same model, humans who speak indistinctly have been said at various times to mamble, mumble, mutter, rumble, fumble, drumble, chunter, and, of course, mussitate. Such evidence suggests that echoic words build up patterns which are reinforced by usage.
Other patterns involve variation of vowel sounds, as in tick-tock, clickety-clack, pitter-patter, and flip-flop. In many languages there seems to be a correlation between the type of vowel and the strength of the sound or action it represents. People are likely to agree that a tock is stronger than a tick, a clank than a clink, a clop than a clip. More subtly, they might distinguish a clang from a clank, which is defined by OED as “A sharp, abrupt sound, as of heavy pieces of metal (e.g. links of a heavy chain) struck together; differing from clang in ending abruptly with the effect of a knock”.
Attention to echoic words has led to some strange and now largely discredited theories of the origins of language, 
0 Comments on Historical Thesaurus: On Sounds and Sense as of 1/1/1900
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”.
Welcome to Historical Thesaurus Week on the OUPblog! Every day this week we will be looking at the first historical thesaurus to be written for any of the world’s languages, the Historical 
Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Conceived and complied by the English Language Department of the University of Glasgow, and based on the Oxford English Dictionary, it is the result of over 40 years of scholarly labor. Today we have an article by Ammon Shea, a good friend of this blog, which looks at how the HTOED could be used to rewrite the Gettysburg Address. Be sure to check back all week to learn more about the HTOED.
Mark Twain once famously remarked that the difference between the almost-right word and the right word was the same as “the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning”. Choosing words based on incomplete information can easily lead to writing that may range from the simply unclear to the laughably wrong. Below is an illustrative example of how the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary might be of use when faced with the need to find the right word, as opposed to the almost-right one.
Imagine you are a student who has been asked to re-write the beginning of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. As an example of how you might do this, we’ve posted the opening line with four words bolded. What options would you have to replace these words with synonyms if you were using the HTOED, as opposed to if you were using an online thesaurus?
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Fathers – Looking in the HTOED, there are 26 different words listed as synonyms of father (ancestor). Every one of these words is provided with dates for the first recorded instance of its use in English. In a number of cases there is also a date provided for a word’s last recorded use as well. Given that the Gettysburg Address was written in 1863, the user of this thesaurus would be informed of the fact that fore-runner, antecestre, and eldfather were no longer in use at that time, but that grandsire, ancestor, and progenitor were.
In the event that one wished to be more specific, there are another 47 words and phrases that are related to the concept of ancestors, all of which are listed under a specific subcategory. For instance, the HTOED differentiates between ancestors in general and female ancestors. It provides separate categories for ancestors in direct line and ancestors collectively.
Furthermore, many of the words found here are assigned usage labels that can inform the user of when it might be appropriate or inappropriate to use them. Progenitrix is listed as figurative, collateral ancestor is specified as being a law term, and kin is listed as being dialectical.
Looking at Thesaurus.com, the first entry that comes up when one searches for ‘father’ exhibits the following range of words, all listed as synonyms: ancestor, begetter, dad, daddy, forebearer, origin, pa, padre, papa, parent, pop, predecessor, procreator, progenitor, sire, source.
The entries from Thesaurus.com are listed in alphabetical order, and do not have any indication of when they might have been current. There is no immediate indication that begetter or sire might be of older vintage than dad. Of the sixteen words, one (pop) is listed as being informal – none of the other entries are labeled in any way.
Nation – When looking at the entry for nation in the HTOED, the historical value of this work is immediately apparent. It shows how recently most of our words that deal with nationality came into existence. There is only one word listed under the category of ‘the state or fact of being a nation’, and that is nationhood, first recorded in 1850. The concept of ‘having a national quality or characteristic’ is first attested to by a single word in 1691 with nationality. And the term nation-building, so common in political speech of late, does not make its appearance in English until 1913.
In addition to providing a wealth of historical data that is not found anywhere else outside of the Oxford English Dictionary itself, the HTOED also gives a list of synonyms that were definitely in use in 1863, and which would be acceptable substitutes, including country, state, and nationality.
Turning again to the first entries in Thesaurus.com we find the following: commonwealth, community, democracy, domain, dominion, empire, land, monarchy, people, populace, population, principality, public, race, realm, republic, society, sovereignty, state, tribe, union. Again, there is no indication of whether any of these words are archaic, or when they entered the language. There are no usage labels for any of them. For some of these words, such as race, it is difficult to truly say that they are in fact synonyms.
Liberty – As was the case with nation, the word liberty has had strikingly few synonyms over the years. In fact, of the nine nouns listed for the concept of liberty (freols, freot, freedom, freeship, freelage, franchise, liberty, and largess) only freedom and liberty were in current usage when Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address. Your choices are suddenly much clearer.
As user of the HTOED would also have a far easier time in finding similar and related words to liberty, not only in the semantic subcategories, but also in the other parts of speech that have to do with liberty and freedom. Nouns that relate to ‘liberty and freedom’ are listed first. The next entry in the thesaurus deals with adjectives that pertain to ‘freedom’. This is followed by adverbs meaning ‘freely’, which is in turn followed by phrases meaning ‘free’ or ‘at liberty’. Once the subjects of freedom and liberty have been exhaustively treated, they are followed by concepts such as independence, liberation, and permission. This logical organizational structure of the HTOED makes it considerably easier to find the right word.
When one looks up liberty in Thesaurus.com one finds an impressive array of synonyms (autarchy, authorization, autonomy, birthright, carte blanche, choice, convenience, decision, deliverance, delivery, dispensation, emancipation, enfranchisement, enlightenment, exemption, franchise, free speech, immunity, independence, leave, leisure, liberation, license, opportunity, permission, power of choice, prerogative, privilege, relaxation, release, rest, right, sanction, self-determination, self-government, sovereignty, suffrage, unconstraint), but as before, it is difficult to say whether many of them share the actual whole meaning of liberty, or if they merely share some of the meaning. Free speech and power of choice may well have something to do with liberty, but it is perhaps not a workable substitute. Perhaps you would choose autarchy, since it is an impressive looking word. It may look good, but unfortunately autarchy carries a fairly specific meaning that refers to economic independence, and so would not be appropriate to use in this case.
Equal – The HTOED is based on the Oxford English Dictionary, and so can boast of having been mined from a resource that is unparalleled and unavailable to any other thesaurus. It is the reason why, when looking at the entry for equal, you will find 129 different words and phrases, divided amongst the main entry and 28 subcategories. It is why you will see categories as finely differentiated as ‘equal in effect’ and ‘equally powerful’ each of which has specific entries that are slightly different. It is why you have access to the full range of words from efen (which means ‘equal’ and dates back to Old English) to the expression toe-to-toe (which means ‘equal or well matched’ and was first recorded in 1942).
The user who is looking for a synonym for equal not only will find such choices as tantamount, even, and equipollent; they will also have all the necessary information to ensure that the choice that they make is guided by decades of scholarship, provided by a team of researchers that is unequalled in the history of the study of the English language.
