MyGlasgow News

Postgradutes who have benefited from scholarships funded by royalties from the Historical Thesaurus of English, will be reunited, with staff, at a lunch this week. Twelve of the fourteen who have been involved since 2010 are meeting at the University.

The Historical Thesaurus of English was the result of 45 years painstaking scholarship by the English Language department. It is the world’s first historical thesaurus.

Publication of the print Historical Thesaurus of the OED (HTOED) has so far generated royalties of around £115,000. Most of this sum is being devoted to furthering research in English Language through a programme of postgraduate scholarships. To date, fourteen scholarships have been awarded. The royalties also fund an annual Samuels lecture, the second of which is being given by John Simpson, Chief Editor of the OED, on 12 November.

The scholarships are named in honour of the four editors of HTOED: Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels and Irené Wotherspoon.

The HTOED was the brainchild of Professor Michael Samuels who saw a gap in the materials available for studying the history of the English Language.
While the Oxford English Dictionary is a hugely rich resource for studying the histories of individual words, there was no parallel resource for studying the history of concepts as they are expressed in words. Samuels therefore announced in a talk to the Philological Society in 1965 that his department would undertake the task of producing such a resource; in 2009 the work was published in print by Oxford University Press as the Historical Thesaurus of the OED (HTOED). It was subsequently linked to the online OED.

First published: 9 October 2013