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When I got home from work Friday the box with my new Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus was on my porch. Ooh, it was heavy! I ripped open the box and was delighted to find a big, beautiful hardcover book. I was expecting a paperback so happiness right from the start.

Not until Saturday afternoon was I able to sit down with my new treasure. When I say treasure I really mean it because this is not your mass market collegiate Roget’s piece of poo. I can say that because I used to have one of them. I got it in high school to help me through those five paragraph English class essays in which it is very important to impress the teacher with your giant vocabulary. At least from a student perspective. No doubt high school English teachers shed many a tear over the failed attempts at verbal acrobatics their students insist on perpetrating. That is probably why my freshman teacher made us read Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. If only we actually paid attention.

I took Roget’s off to college with me. I must have used it through the years. A lot. By the time I sent it to the great recycling bin in the sky a few years ago, the pages were thoroughly foxed, the cover creased and worn, and the spine cracked. I used it because there was no alternative when searching for the perfect word. When the magic internet came along Roget sat collecting dust. But Google isn’t any better than Roget really, just more convenient and less dusty.

So why would I want a brand new thesaurus? I didn’t until I read Michael Dirda singing the praises of the Oxford American in an essay in his book Browsings. Now that I have had a chance to look the book over I wonder if I can make you want one too?

I said the book is beautiful, right? A lovely blue and white jacket on the outside. On the inside an easily readable font in a size many times above microscopic. In fact, if the book weren’t so heavy I could hold it up just far enough away that I can read it without my glasses on. These eyes are over forty and I must say it was the freakiest thing when my optometrist told me at thirty-nine that my eyes will likely begin needing a little extra help at forty. Pshaw! I snorted. Then a year later I was back in her chair telling her the letters in my books were looking a little fuzzy. At first I tried to pass it off as power of suggestion but I couldn’t make that last very long. The paper is bright white but not glaring and the thickness is just right – not so thin you are terrified of ripping the pages as you turn them but not so thick that they aren’t flexible and easy to thumb through.

While the book is a pleasure, it is what’s inside that really counts: Rabbit hole. You know how when you have a really good dictionary like the OED or American Heritage and you can get lost for hours just looking up words, leaping from one entry to another? Tell me this happens to you too and I am not out all alone in left field here. This thesaurus is just like that. Words leading to more words.

Each entry tells you the part of speech, uses the word in context and suggests antonyms. There are also little “more information” boxes for words that cause grammar nightmares like backward/backwards. There are also little boxes that offer helpful suggestions, providing a “word link” or “choose the right word” or the best ones, “reflection.” The reflection is a little tiny thought about the word by one of a number of writers like Zadie Smith, Lydia Davis and the dastardly Michael Dirda who made me buy this magnificent book. There are also quotes sprinkled throughout and word clouds sometimes appear to provide a visual representation of frequently associated words that might go with that adjective you just looked up.

In the middle of the book appears a section called “Word Finder.” The pages are bordered in light gray so you can easily open to this section when you pick up the book. Here you will find thematic lists in case you want to know what all the chemical elements and their symbols are. Or lists of dog breeds or different types of restaurants or cheeses. There is also a list of words considered archaic (darbies = handcuffs), “literary” words (clarion, slay, visage), and common Latin phrases.

There are more gray-edged pages at the back of the book. These are dedicated to basic grammar, spelling and punctuation. Nothing elaborate, just the basics in case you need help with your dangling participle or whether you need a comma there.

This is a thesaurus intended for writers after all. But it also serves word-lovers well. It would be especially marvy when paired with a good dictionary so they could talk to each other. This baby will be talking with my American Heritage. They will be canoodling on my desk together. I expect they will get along well. Sorry Google.

It isn’t too late to add this to your list for Santa or find a copy for your favorite word nerd. Almost guaranteed to be love at first sight.

There are already a bunch of online thesaurus sites out there, like Thesaurus.com, Merriam-Webster's Thesaurus, Collins Thesaurus, Visual Thesaurus and others, but Power Thesaurus was the first crowd-sourced online thesaurus I've come across.

I like the clean interface, without all kinds of ads cluttering the space. Just noticed that my friend Tara Lazar also likes it:

I prefer https://t.co/DzrosrUnZD because it's really fast. It doesn't load with tons of ads. Gets me to the word I want FASTER. #amwriting

— 匕คrค lคzค尺 ツ (@taralazar) September 2, 2015

Power Thesaurus creator Alexander Radyushin kindly agreed to answer a few questions for me:

Q. What made you decide to start Power Thesaurus?

Few years ago I was developing a presentation about website development and it became obvious to me that existing thesauri are simply too inconvenient to use as well as their content is not up to date considering the modern pace of language development. So, for me it was obvious that somebody has to combine the power of crowdsourcing with modern web usability standards and create a user-oriented online thesaurus that is been developed for one primary goal - assist user in their pursuit for most relevant terms. In comparison to other similar tools (like thesaurus.com), Power Thesaurus has a greater focus on clean content presentation and ability to narrow down the lists by using parts of speech and/or topic filters.

Q. What has feedback been like so far?

We have a very positive response from writing community. We see a stable growth of regular users as well as very positive reviews of Power Thesaurus by writers in their emails, blogs and social networks. Some of them are listed here: http://www.powerthesaurus.org/_testimonials and in Twitter search https://twitter.com/search?q=powerthesaurus

Q. Any plans for future improvements you'd like to share?

At the moment we are completely rewriting the website and applications (iOS and Android) to a new version of Power Thesaurus that will have a large number of updates in all areas. Few of them are: richer content like phrases, more functionality like term popularity and definitions, upgraded look & feel, including personal customizations, International versions. Some people say that Power Thesaurus is already almost a perfect online thesaurus, however our team still see the potential for a great number of further improvement that will keep us very busy at least in the following years.

Feel free to try out Power Thesaurus yourself: Powerthesaurus.org.

Are you a Power Thesaurus fan? Is there another online writer's thesaurus you'd like to recommend? Feel free to post below.

     Young Author's Camps are well under way. It's Sunday night, and I am anticipating tomorrow's new group of writers. To (sort of) quote Forrest Gump, "Writing campers are like a box of chocolates.  You never know what you are going to get."

    If this camp is true to form, it will be a Whitman's Sampler of writers. Kids whose parents think I am running a remedial writing boot camp despite the Parks' Department naming the program "Writing is Fun!"  (Remember that exclamation point.)  Learning disabled kids.  Kids who are there because their parents need a place to park them for the week...and mine was the only camp that still had openings. (Always flattering to hear, "You're all that was left.") And of course, there are usually some kids who there because they love to write. Usually. Not always.

   For the last several years, every session has had a core of writers for whom English is a second language. No one can put together a perfect English sentence the way a 10-year-old who learned the language in school can. Their subjects and verbs agree, something that seems "optional" to a number of "English only" kids. Tenses don't leap from past to present to future in the same sentence.  Punctuation is meticulous. Speaking of punctuation, these ESOL kids have learned the Power of the Punctuation Point.

    A lot of kids let the exclamation point do all the heavy lifting in a sentence.  Rather than show the reader fear, joy, surprise (fill in the emotion here), they toss big handfuls of exclamation points instead.  A paragraph of five sentences will include six exclamation points. (More is better, right?) After awhile those little points seem to rise off the page in platoons, stabbing at my eyeballs. A slight exaggeration, but after awhile all you see on the page is !!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Example:  I was so sad when we moved!  I left all my friends behind!  I didn't know anybody at school!  I hated school! I was always in a bad mood!  Even my dog was in a bad mood!!!!

    Why are these kids so dependent on the point?  My first thought is to blame texting and email which has shrunk language down to emoticons and acronyms (OMG, LOL, 😄).  But most of my students are not allowed on social media, or have email accounts. Back in the day, teachers blamed comic books for sloppy punctuation (Pow! Biff! Bam!  Take that, Batman!).  I haven't run across any of comic fans among my writers.  Video games like World of Warcraft or Call of Duty, yes.  Comic books, no.

     There are a handful of chapter book writers who go over the top with the punctuation points for comic effect. I'm not laughing, but the kids are.  Still, even those writers do it a couple of times per book at most, not every sentence.

    It comes back to something I've posted about before...vocabulary.  For my young writers, it is easier to use my two pet peeves, the word "very" combined with an adjective and an exclamation point.  In revision of their work, I encourage them to find another way of expressing the emotion without using "very."

   Example:  The test was very hard!

  Alternatives:  The test was: challenging complicated confusing demanding difficult exhausting puzzling tiring unclear. (Pick one.)

  Each of the alternatives offers a clearer picture of how or why the test was "hard."  Was it physically
hard?  Did your head ache?  Did you write so much your hand hurt?  Or was it hard to understand?  Were the directions unclear?  Did you mix-up your facts?  Or were the questions more difficult than you expected?  Or did it just make you think harder?  "Hard" can mean a lot of things in describing a test.  What exactly did you mean?

    At this point I bring out my trusty thesaurus collection: beginners, intermediate and Roget's.  My students are familiar with the thesaurus...the one on their word processing program.  I compare the meager selection offered by the computer program to the many, many options in the thesaurus. They learn they cannot slide by with what I call "wimp words"...words too general to say what they mean. The substitutions for wimp words are in the thesaurus.  By the end of the week, they have almost eliminated phrases such as very beautiful, very hot, very boring. Instead, flowers are exquisite, days swelter and TV shows uninteresting.

    Once the "enabler" word "very" disappears, the punctuation marks often disappear as well.  At least they do in descriptive passages.  They still seem to show up in dialog.  How else do you show some one is excited?  Example:  "It's raining!" she said excitedly.

   In this case, the culprit is "said." Said is a perfectly good word.  It's meant to be unobtrusive in dialog.  Sometimes, however, you want to know how that sentence is...well...said. How could you show the speaker is excited without that pesky exclamation point?  Swap said for one of the following verbs:  screamed, shouted, yelled, exclaimed, moaned, groaned, cried, wailed, howled, wailed, gasped, choked,shrieked, rejoiced, squealed, cheered, announced.

   If after all those choices the writer still can't let go of that exclamation point, I issue an ultimatum. Two exclamation points for the whole piece.  More than two, I tell the student, "Imagine that I control  the world supply of exclamation points.  If you wan to use on, they are now a hundred dollars apiece."  The silliness of the notion usually makes the writer think twice about using them.

    Again, in the words of Forrest Gump..."And that's all I have to say about that."

    No exclamation point.

    BOOK GIVEAWAY

    Today is the last time to register for our give away of JoAnn Early Macken's board book, BABY SAYS MOO.  For details, see JoAnn's June 12 post.

    Posted by Mary Ann Rodman



    

   

How do you choose the right word? Some just don’t fit what you’re trying to convey, either in the labor of love prose for your creative writing class, or the rogue auto-correct function on your phone.

Can you shed lacerations instead of tears? How is the word barren an attack on women? How do writers such as Joshua Ferris, Francine Prose, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and Simon Winchester weigh and inveigh against words?

We sat down with Katherine Martin and Allison Wright, editors of the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, to discuss what makes a word distinctive from others and what writers can teach you about language.

Writing Today, the Choice of Words, and the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus

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Reflections in the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus

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The Use and Abuse of a Thesaurus

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Katherine Martin is Head of US Dictionaries at Oxford University Press. Allison Wright is Editor, US Dictionaries at Oxford University Press.

Much more than a word list, the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus is a browsable source of inspiration as well as an authoritative guide to selecting and using vocabulary. This essential guide for writers provides real-life example sentences and a careful selection of the most relevant synonyms, as well as new usage notes, hints for choosing between similar words, a Word Finder section organized by subject, and a comprehensive language guide. The third edition revises and updates this innovative reference, adding hundreds of new words, senses, and phrases to its more than 300,000 synonyms and 10,000 antonyms. New features in this edition include over 200 literary and humorous quotations highlighting notable usages of words, and a revised graphical word toolkit feature showing common word combinations based on evidence in the Oxford Corpus. There is also a new introduction by noted language commentator Ben Zimmer.

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We’ve been talking about editing this month on the Children’s Book Hub. Even though I myself am a freelance children’s book editor as well as an author, I rely heavily on my collaborations with editors – at our publishing house, as well as on a freelance basis.

My mother and I are fortunate to work with truly gifted editors at our publishing houses – but for my own independent projects I always seek feedback from a freelance editor (such as Emma D. Dryden, whom I interviewed this month for the Hub).  You see, I’m not very good at editing myself.

There are many good reasons to work with a freelance editor in today’s publishing world – but here is perhaps the most compelling one:  Once a manuscript has been rejected, it will seldom be reconsidered by that same publisher… even if you rewrite it.  So it’s very important to get it as polished as we can be before the submission process begins, and the best way I know to do that is to hire a freelance editor.

That said, there are a number of things we can do to become better self-editors, to get our manuscripts into the best possible shape even before we submit them to a freelance editor… and I thought, given this month’s focus on editing, I’d explore some of them. Here’s one for those of you who use Microsoft Word:

Use the Find and Replace and Thesaurus tools.

“Find and replace” is the most efficient way to replace overused words. For instance, I tend to overuse the word “wonderful”. It crops up all the time in what I’m writing and it drives me insane. What I do is write, write, write – and when I’m done, I click “Find” (under the Edit tab), type in the word “wonderful” and each time the tool pulls it up in the manuscript I choose a better word to replace it with (using the “Thesaurus” tool – or the real, bound Thesaurus if I get stuck!)

If you want to change a character’s name, you can use the find and replace tool to pull up all the “Mickey’s” and change them to “Mikey” in one mouse click. You can click “find next” and walk through the manuscript word by word, or you can click “find all” and do a global replace on a word or name.

Among the things you might want to ‘find and replace’ (with better choices from your Thesaurus!) are:

• Cheap or cheesy modifiers (very, just, etc.)
• Passive verbs / tentative or weak sentence construction (was going, been having, seemed, felt etc.)
• Words you use too often (wonderful, like, suddenly, little)
• Adverbs that prop up weak verbs
• A character’s name (Replace All)

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

Lauren, Publicity Assistant

It’s sad, but true. Historical Thesaurus week has come to an end. We feel like we’ve read it cover to cover (to cover to cover) and it’s hard to let go. And so, I’d like to leave you with a valuable lesson I learned: how to use the HTOED to call someone “stupid” in Old English. In this video post, Judy Pearsall (OUP’s Reference Publishing Manager) discusses how words are connected to one another in a HTOED entry, using the example of “foolish person.” Watch the video after the jump.

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Lauren, Publicity Assistant

Ammon Shea is a vocabularian, lexicographer, and the author of Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. In the videos below, he discusses the evolution of terms like “Love Affair” and names of diseases, as traced in the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, demonstrating how language changes and reflects cultural histories. Shea also dives into the HTOED to talk about the longest entry, interesting word connections, and comes up with a few surprises. (Do you know what a “strumpetocracy” is?) Watch both videos after the jump. Be sure to check back all week to learn more about the HTOED.

Love, Pregnancy, and Venereal Disease in the Historical Thesaurus

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Inside the Historical Thesaurus

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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.

By Ashley Bray, Intern Extraordinaire

Few people can get excited over thesauruses like writers can, and as a writer and student myself, I eagerly sat down to take a look at the new Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus. I was immediately drawn to the Word Notes, which are comments from contributing authors about word entries. I love these notes because they bring you inside the heads of authors to show you just what they are thinking about certain words— a privilege a budding writer almost never gets! I looked up a bunch of notes by David Foster Wallace in light of his recent death, and I wanted to share my favorites.

One of the more interesting notes I came across was for pulchritude, which is a synonym for beauty. Wallace points out that this word is anything but beautiful:

“A paradoxical noun because it means beauty but is itself one of the ugliest words in the language. Same goes for the adjectival form pulchritudinous. They’re part of a tiny elite cadre of words that possess the very opposite of the qualities they denote. Diminutive, big, foreign, fancy (adjective), colloquialism, and monosyllabic are some others; there are at least a dozen more. Inviting your school-age kids to list as many paradoxical words as they can is a neat way to deepen their relationship to English and help them see that words are both symbols for things and very real things themselves.”

Well, Wallace is right about the ugliness of pulchritude. Words like putrid and sepulcher come to mind before beauty ever does. Wallace also points out a very interesting activity that I think appeals to word-lovers just as much as “school-age kids.” I decided to take his suggestion in a different direction and started to make a list of words that do correlate with their meaning. Here’s what I came up with:

• Bedraggled
• Labyrinthine
• Bubble
• Prickly
• Stuck
• Pierce

What words can you think of that are either paradoxical or parallel to their meanings?

Wallace also wrote an awesome entry for hairy. Here’s another word game for you— how many different ways can you think of to say the word hairy?

You’d be surprised at the answer. Wallace writes about 22 different ways (and two additional classifications) to say the word hairy. I won’t list them all here, but I’ll give you a taste of some of the most “hair-raising” (excuse the pun):

• Glabrous: “the loveliest of all hair-related adjectives, means having no hair (on a given part) at all. Please note that glabrous means more baby’s-bottom-hairless than bald or shaved, though if you wanted to describe a bald person in an ironically fancy way you could talk about his glabrous dome or something.” Quite frankly, after that description how could you not want to find a way to use glabrous in your writing?
• Tomentose: “means ‘covered with dense little matted hairs’— baby chimps, hobbits’ feet, and Robin Williams are all tomentose.” Need I comment further on this gem?
• Crinite: “means ‘hairy or possessed of a hair-like appendage,’ though its mainly a botanical term and would be a bit eccentric applied to a person.” I don’t care if it’s eccentric— I smell a story centering on a person with a “hair-like appendage.”

Come on fellow writers, any takers?

By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK

In amongst the many fascinating facts and stories around the OED that we have been hearing about during the celebrations, yesterday we also heard about an exciting project that is headed for publication in autumn 2009: the Historical Thesaurus.

Robert Faber, Editorial Director of Scholarly and General Reference, told us that the project has been in progress for decades now at my Alma Mater, The University of Glasgow, and is creating a historical thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary.

It will be organized along thematic lines, and will be publishing in two volumes late next year. The example he used was that people would now be able to find out every word that meant “strong liquor” in the 18th century, which is the kind of thing that will be invaluable for writers, historians and many other people.

Based on the content of the currently in print second edition of the OED, its findings will eventually be incorporated into the OED online.

As a bit of a word geek myself, I’m already looking forward to see this in the flesh (paper?), especially as I remember walking past the Historical Thesaurus office at Glasgow every day for four years on my way to the student union!

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