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About Historical Thesaurus

The Historical Thesaurus is a taxonomic classification of the majority of senses and lemmas in OED Online. It can be thought of as a kind of semantic index to the contents of the OED.

The Historical Thesaurus can be used in OED Online to navigate around the dictionary by topic, find related terms, and explore the lexical history of a concept or meaning.

Each class (a list of senses and lemmas sharing a particular meaning) is arranged chronologically, giving a historical overview of the concept represented by that class.

You can start using the Historical Thesaurus by clicking on any of the headings to the left and browsing through the Thesaurus ‘tree’ or by searching for a word or heading using the “Search” box.