Alexander, M.

Kay, C.

English

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Life after the historical thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary

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       Kay, C. and Alexander, M. (2010) Life after the historical thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, 31 . pp. 107-112. ISSN 0197-6745  http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/49097  Deposited on: 21 February 2011   Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk Life after the Historical Thesaurus of the OEDChristian Kay and Marc AlexanderThe Historical Thesaurus of the OED (HTOED) was published byOxford University Press (OUP) on 22 October 2009 (Kay etal. 2009). It consists of two substantial volumes, the first containing some800,000 meanings arranged in semantic categories, the second an index.Publication was the culmination of 44 years of work by a team in the Eng-lish Language department at the University of Glasgow, led initially byProfessor M. L. Samuels, and from 1989 by Professor Christian Kay1. Final DaysThrough accident rather than design, the very end stages of dataentry in July 2008 overlapped with a conference at Glasgow involving anumber of team members, fraying the nerves of all involved. So it wasthat midway through the conference the project director returned to theoffice to be informed that not only had the last slip been typed into thedatabase, but by serendipity or careful planning this final entry was theword thesaurus itself. A week later, a CD containing all the data files wasposted to OUP; the project team insisted on a formal handing-over cere-mony on the department doorstep, with photographs of Christian Kaysolemnly delivering the envelope into the hands of the University janitorentrusted with the task of conveying it to the mailroom. However, the na-ture of the data and the complexity of the project was such that, after thismilestone, there followed a long series of further deadlines and otherlandmarks, rather than there being any one single point of completion.1 For a history of the project, see, inter alia, the front matter of HTOED, Kay (forthcoming),Wotherspoon (forthcoming), the Glasgow website at http://libra.englang.arts.gla.ac.uk/WebThesHTML/homepage.html, and for an earlier perspective, Collier and Kay’s 1980 in-terim report in Dictionaries 3.Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 31 (2010), 107–112Kay_Alexander_Layout 1  10/24/10  2:11 PM  Page 107The data went on a long journey in the final year. Once the paperslips were categorized, they had been typed into dBASE files using an in-house data entry program in batches of around 30. These files were com-bined into larger batches, converted to Microsoft Excel format, and thencombined once more into 186 files roughly representing a large semanticdomain each. At OUP, these were converted to plain text format, checkedusing Perl scripts, and then converted once more to three XML files to beprovided to the typesetters, who then produced InDesign files for printing.These typeset pages were supplied as PDFs to Glasgow, where they wereprinted, proofed, scanned as TIFFs, and converted back to PDFs. The an-notations on these were inserted into the XML and thus updated on the In-Design files. At each stage of this process, nicknamed the “dance of the files,”the possibilities for disaster in the conversion process increased — in manyways, it was a blessing that those problems which did arise were usually rel-atively minor, although distinctly trying under tight publication deadlines.There then began a short break while the volumes were typesetabroad, although any relief this provided was marred by a cautious memberof the team calculating that the typesetter’s claim of a “99.995% accuracyrate,” when applied to HTOED’s 22.74 million pieces of data, would resultin over 1,100 new errors being created. A welcome distraction from suchspeculations was provided by the arrival of OUP’s designs for the HTOEDwallchart, included with every copy to give an overview of its conceptual hi-erarchy. Proofreading then went quickly and with a minimum of hiccups,although it naturally revealed some blunders we were glad to remove be-fore publication — one such was an unfortunate creature noted within theLife section as being “devoid of Brian,” soon corrected to “devoid of brain.”The first advance copy arrived in Glasgow on 21 August 2009. Ahost of colleagues from across the entire campus, almost all of whom hadlived with the presence of the Thesaurus project from their very first daysat the University, found reasons to come to the department and fingerits binding somewhat incredulously. It was at this point that we realisedthat we had actually succeeded despite all the obstacles along the way. AsPhilip Pullman wrote in his endorsement of the book: “… here is the in-formation we had to spend hours hunting down through the thickets andcoverts of the great OED, shot, stuffed, and mounted for us”.PublicationThe calendar of publication and pre-publication events then tookoff. A pre-launch was held in London on 7 July 2009, and had the desired108                                     Christian Kay and Marc AlexanderKay_Alexander_Layout 1  10/24/10  2:11 PM  Page 108effect of stimulating press interest, resulting in numerous feature articles,radio interviews, and even an editorial in the Times of London. The pressquestions focused in the main on the sheer length of the project, the firewhich almost destroyed the entire slip collection in 1978, people’s favoritewords, and the ages of the editors. The team began during the proofread-ing process to assemble a list of these “favorite” words to satisfy journalisticenquiries, although many of those collected by PhD student proofreadersturned out to be unpublishable in family newspapers.The launch proper took place in Glasgow in October, whenaround 100 former workers and supporters gathered for drinks andspeeches. A particular pleasure was that Prof. Samuels was able to attendand give a short talk on his reasons for starting the project. Those whohad known him as a lecturer earlier in their careers were seen to sit upstraight and start taking notes. In fact, the creation of the HTOED wasprecisely bookended by two of Prof. Samuels’ speeches: the project for-mally began on 15 January 1965 at an address to the Philological Societyin London, where he announced that the work would be undertaken byhimself and his colleagues at Glasgow, and it ended at the launch partyon 22 October 2009. The project thus consumed 44 years, 9 months and1 week exactly (or 16,351 days). It cost £1.1million in grants (when ad-justed for inflation approximately £2.2m/$3.4m in 2010), plus a gooddeal of uncosted academic time; a bargain at a little over 1p per word andaround 340 words a week.Even at the launch, there were hints that HTOED was selling muchbetter than expected, and in November we learned that the first printinghad sold out. A second printing was rushed through in time for Christ-mas, and there were two more in 2010. It was gratifying that the bookseemed to appeal to word-lovers generally as well as to its primary targetof academic users. Another unexpected market was the surprising num-ber of historical novelists who appear to see in HTOED a means of pro-viding a ring of authenticity to their dialogue.As well as offering parties and press interviews, the period aroundpublication provided an opportunity to speak at conferences on the fullwork. After many years of papers based on available excerpts, the first talkto use the full HTOED database in its complete form was given in March2009. Between then and summer 2010, over thirty papers were presentedin the UK, Europe, and North America by team members alone. Moreimportantly, we have begun to see papers appearing in print and at con-ferences by scholars who were not involved in the creation of the work it-self, but have gratifyingly grasped even at this early stage the opportunitiesit offers them to advance their own research.                                 Life after the Historical Thesaurus of the OED 109Kay_Alexander_Layout 1  10/24/10  2:11 PM  Page 109Last WordsOne of the worst aspects of finishing a major project is the require-ment to clear up after it. By the end of the project, we had accumulatedwell over a million paper slips, and a set of OED volumes recording allthe meanings which had been included. These had been treasured overthe years, especially after the aforementioned fire, when they were savedonly because they were stored in metal drawers in metal cabinets. On theone hand, since all the data were now held on computer, it seemed point-less to keep a paper version. On the other hand, some of the slips con-tained discussions about where they should be classified, recording manychanges of mind, or comments on the OED data, or other interestingmarginalia in the manner of medieval manuscripts. It was not impossiblethat future scholars might wish to track our mental processes throughthese stages, or debate whether the more sinister-looking stains might beblood or merely coffee. In the end a compromise was reached, and theslips were sent to the Glasgow University archive, with a note to reviewthe situation in ten years’ time.Preparing the slips for departure and moving out of the workroomthe project had occupied for many years were sad as well as strenuous oc-casions. Even sadder was saying goodbye to most of the people who hadworked with such dedication and good humour during the final phaseof the project. Luckily, this sadness was overcome by excitement at seeingthe whole work complete and published at last. Plans were set in motionby OUP to incorporate HTOED into the relaunched OED3 website, so thatthe two could be searched in tandem. Clicking on an OED meaning ac-cesses the list of HTOED synonyms, while clicking on a word in an HTOEDlist connects the user to the full range of information in the OED.Finally, a few months after publication, we were able to announcethe HTOED Scholarships at Glasgow. Funded entirely from the print edi-tion’s royalties, these scholarships for new postgraduates researching anypart of the English language were agreed long before publication to bethe most appropriate reinvestment of any income earned by the The-saurus. The first four HTOED scholars began their studies at Glasgow inSeptember 2010.Future PlansOne of the most frustrating things about working on a major proj-ect is that it leaves the editors little time for exploiting its research poten-110                                     Christian Kay and Marc AlexanderKay_Alexander_Layout 1  10/24/10  2:11 PM  Page 110tial. Over the years we responded to requests for data from over 40 col-leagues around the world, and in due course these became articles or dis-sertations. But at home, apart from the theses produced by our ownstudents, research output was restricted by lack of time, and papers weresometimes written with at least half an eye to potential sources of funding.Now we have been liberated by publication, and have time to contemplatethe full richness of HTOED, and to plan how to exploit the features whichgive researchers a unique new perspective on the history of the Englishlanguage. We will maintain a revised version of the project on the Uni-versity of Glasgow website. Like the print HTOED, but unlike the one onthe OED website, which follows the OED policy of not including wordswhich died out before 1150, this version will contain all the vocabularyfrom A Thesaurus of Old English (Roberts and Kay 2000).Furthermore, as the HTOED project was one of the first to usecomputers in humanities research2, it has progressed side-by-side with theevolution of what is now known as the digital humanities. There are manypotential applications of its data in the computational sphere alongsidethe use of the originally-envisaged print volumes. As the project was com-ing to an end, the UK Joint Information Systems Committee funded theEnroller project at Glasgow, designed to bring together various datasetsin the study of language and literature into a single online platform.HTOED will be in Enroller alongside various corpora and dictionaries, al-lowing researchers not only to easily browse the data, but also to carryout meaning-based searches using two or more of the resources together(such as “find all the words in the SCOTS corpus to do with drunkenness”or “find all the contemporary words for excellent in this eighteenth cen-tury text”).Beyond this, there are scholars planning to use HTOED in manydifferent and previously unthought-of manners. Projects are being set upto investigate the history of metaphor in English by computationally find-ing the source and target domains of transferred or figurative usesthroughout the entire HTOED database; to tag political texts both mod-ern and historical with the precise semantic domain of each word formused; to examine spelling variation by semantically disambiguating wordforms and then analysing their orthographic reflexes; to analyse modernhistorical fiction through charting its lexical authenticity (or lackthereof); or even to demonstrate visually historical trauma in semanticfields throughout the past 800 years of English. Taking into account con-                                 Life after the Historical Thesaurus of the OED 1112 See Kay and Chase (1987) and Wotherspoon (1992).Kay_Alexander_Layout 1  10/24/10  2:11 PM  Page 111ference papers, publications and symposia both completed and planned,the volume of research activities arising from HTOED barely half a yearfrom its launch day is encouraging.These possibilities, more than anything else, represent the culmi-nation of what over 230 people have worked on for the past 44 years andmore. In these implementations and investigations into the data, we seescholars who have spent almost their whole career creating HTOED work-ing alongside younger academics who can see their own careers consist-ing of using it. We feel there is no greater or more fitting end to the longhistory of this project for the HTOED to be used, to be exploited, and tobe improved — both in the ways which were originally intended and inothers as yet unimagined.ReferencesCollier, Leslie and Christian Kay. 1980. The Historical Thesaurus of English. Dic-tionaries 2/3: 88–112.Kay, Christian, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels and Irené Wotherspoon. 2009. His-torical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.Kay, Christian. Forthcoming. Classification: Principles and Practice. In CunningPassages, Contrived Corridors: Unexpected Essays in the History of Lexicography,edited by Michael Adams. Monza: Polimetrica. Kay, Christian and Thomas J. P. Chase. 1987. Constructing a Thesaurus Database.Literary and Linguistic Computing 2: 161–163.Roberts, Jane and Christian Kay with Lynne Grundy. 1995. A Thesaurus of Old Eng-lish. (= King’s College London Medieval Studies XI.) Second edition, 2000.Amsterdam: Rodopi.Wotherspoon, Irené. 1992. Historical Thesaurus Database Using Ingres. Literaryand Linguistic Computing 7: 218–225.Wotherspoon, Irené. Forthcoming. The Making of the Historical Thesaurus ofthe Oxford English Dictionary. In Cunning Passages, Contrived Corridors:Unexpected Essays in the History of Lexicography, edited by Michael Adams.Monza: Polimetrica.112                                     Christian Kay and Marc AlexanderKay_Alexander_Layout 1  10/24/10  2:11 PM  Page 112

A Thesaurus of Old English.

Constructing a Thesaurus Database.

Historical Thesaurus Database Using Ingres. Literary and Linguistic Computing 7: 218–225. Wotherspoon, Irené. Forthcoming. The Making of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The Historical Thesaurus of English.

http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/49097/1/id49097.pdf

Life after the historical thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary

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