4. The Historical Thesaurus

The Historical Thesaurus is a semantic index of the contents of the OED…

With the Historical Thesaurus, OED Online provides powerful new ways to explore language, history, and culture...

…almost every word, phrase, and meaning throughout the dictionary…

…covering more than 1,000 years of the English language.

Each dictionary sense is connected to its semantic class in the thesaurus…

…with direct links to equivalent terms elsewhere in the OED… …and a link to the thesaurus itself.

Within the thesaurus, all the terms in a class are listed in chronological order… …so you can trace the development of a concept over time. The tree on the left shows the location of this class in the thesaurus taxonomy… …you can browse the tree to explore related concepts.

From the thesaurus home page, you can browse the tree from the top levels downwards… …or search directly for a term.

Results show each class in which the search term occurs… …select a result to view the class in full…

Click any term to go directly to the corresponding sense in the dictionary.

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