Historical Thesaurus of English

Historical Thesaurus of English
Type of site
Academic
OwnerUniversity of Glasgow
EditorChristian Kay, Marc Alexander, Fraser Dallachy, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, and Irené Wotherspoon (editors)
URLwww.ht.ac.uk
CommercialNo
RegistrationNone
Current statusVersion 4.21, since December 2016[1]
Content licence
Free for personal and non-commercial research[2]

The Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE) is the largest thesaurus in the world. It is called a historical thesaurus as it arranges the whole vocabulary of English, from the earliest written records in Old English to the present, according to the first documented occurrence of a word in the entire history of the English language. The HTE was conceived and begun in 1965 by the English Language & Linguistics department of the University of Glasgow, who have ever since continued to compile the thesaurus. From the 1980s onwards the project was moved from paper-based records to a computer database.

Today, the HTE is available to the public online, but a print version, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED), was published in 2009.

  1. ^ "Versions of the Thesaurus". The Historical Thesaurus of English. University of Glasgow. Retrieved 15 October 2019.
  2. ^ "Using Historical Thesaurus Data". The Historical Thesaurus of English. University of Glasgow. Retrieved 25 October 2014.