I'm now going to talk about why you might want to use the (HTOED) in research.
Apart from it just being endlessly fascinating and browsable, I think.
One reason you might want to use the Historical Thesaurus is to look at what synonyms are
available at a given time for a particular concept, which can help shed light on why
a writer needs a particular lexical choice, for example. I'll just show
this using the example of milk livered. Or so I'm going to go to milk livered in the OED.
So this word, milk livered, meaning cowardly, and, we can see that this was first used in King Lear.
And, you might wonder, well, what other concepts, what other words
were available for this concept? What other words could Shakespeare have used instead?
So we'll go to the thesaurus category, just the adjective category within characters.
And you can see all these words meaning cowardly, arranged chronologically.
So I'm going to start scrolling down towards the Early Middle, early modern English periods. And I
can see that here we have white-livered, which was already in use in Shakespeare's time, it was first
used in 1546. So if I click on white-livered I’ll to go to the entry for white-livered.
You see there it is, meaning cowardly, first used 1546 – (I could open the) etymology.
And the etymology explains that this word is based on the former popular belief that a light-coloured
liver was considered deficient in bile or choler, and hence lacking in vigour, spirits, or courage.
We'll go back to the thesaurus category now. Again, back down
to that part, so we can see that white-livered was already in use, and what this is based on is other
similar words like liver-hearted, white-hearted, milky, so we can see that Shakespeare articulated
these concepts and use them to create the semantically rich term milk-livered and not long,
around the same time in Macbeth, (there is) the first use the word lily-livered as well.
The Historical Thesaurus is also a really rich resource for exploring patterns within semantic
fields. And so you can look at what types of words have been used to express a particular concept.
And in what periods have there been lots of coinage just for that concept,
and so on. And there's lots been written on this, you know, in terms of many different semantic
fields, I won't say very much here. But just to give an example, within this cowardice section,
we can already see just by skimming through it, is that there are lots of words for cowardice that
have been related to lack of heart or weakness of heart, or heartless, faint-hearted, or unhearty
and so on, or based on that sort of older notion of the heart as the seat of courage.
And further down, lots of animal metaphors, especially
chickens and hens have been regarded as cowardly. So you could explore a lot there
for example, going back to the inferior writer category that we looked at earlier.
Looking at this category, we can see that lots of the words that have been used to mean
inferior writer are based on the idea of physically spoiling the paper: paper-blurrer,
paper-stainer, squitter-book and so on. And then by extension, producing inferior writing.
And then other thing of interest here is that a lot of the these words were coined
in the early modern periods. Since they are very well lexicalized semantic fields in early modern
English, when there was a lot of interest in elegance of style or in inelegance of style.
Another reason for using the Historical Thesaurus is to find out what earlier
words were available for a particular concept. Look at this with reference to
restaurants. I'm just going to go to restaurants in the OED.
So here is the OED entry for restaurant. And we can see that it was first used in English in 1806.
As we might want to know what public eating houses were called before that. We can click
on the thesaurus link go to eating house or restaurants. And we can see that there were
lots of words available. Before restaurant was borrowed, so eating-house, feast-house, cookshop,
cookhouse, and so on. And then a little bit before restaurant, we have restaurateur and restorator
also borrowed from or modelled after French from that same, same sense of restore. So this kind
of information can help prevent anachronisms in historical fiction. And so say you were writing
a novel set in Britain in the 17th century. For example, you might not want to have your
characters talking about going to restaurants, but you could make them go to a cookshop instead.
And it can help with searching historical texts. So if you're interested in early
eating establishments, you have a whole set of terms here to use in searches and
you could go to related categories, so coffee or tea room, or you could look at tavern or
public house which sits within drink and have a set of terms to help you with your searches.