Historical Thesaurus of English
Type of site | Academic |
|---|---|
| Owner | University of Glasgow |
| Editor | Christian Kay, Marc Alexander, Fraser Dallachy, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, and Irené Wotherspoon (editors) |
| URL | www |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | None |
| Current status | Version 4.21, since December 2016 |
Content licence | Free for personal and non-commercial research |
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.