The Word “Immediately” Has 265 Synonyms

National Thesaurus Day, on January 18th, honors Peter Mark Roget, the author of Roget’s Thesaurus, who was born on this day in 1779.

• 1st Century – Philo of Byblos, a Greek historian and grammarian, wrote On Synonyms, a dictionary of synonyms that scholars consider to be the first ancient thesaurus. Dating to the late 1st century or early 2nd century CE, the book lists Greek words that are similar in meaning. Sadly, we don’t know much more about On Synonyms because copies of the work haven’t survived over the centuries.
• 4th Century – Sanskritis had a thesaurus in verse form, titled ‘Amarakosha.’
• 1779 – Peter Mark Roget, the creator of the first modern thesaurus, is born in London. His work would later become a seminal resource for writers and linguists.
• 1815 – Roget invented the slide rule, a ruler-like device that allows users to easily calculate the roots and exponents of numbers. So while the inventor of the thesaurus was compiling words for his tome, he was also hard at work on the slide rule..
• 1840 – Roget retired from a successful career in medicine and spent the rest of his life working on “Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases.” He only started work on his Thesaurus after retirement in his 60s.
• 1848 – Peter Mark Roget begins writing the unofficial ‘Thesaurus.’
• 1852 – Peter Mark Roget published the first edition of Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, revolutionizing language reference books and aiding writers in finding more precise words.
• 1965 – Scholars began writing the HTOED – it took 44 years to complete and was published in 2009.
  • At just under 4,000 pages, the HTOED (Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary) is the largest thesaurus in the world. It covers approximately 800,000-word meanings from Old English to the present day.
  • In total, 230 people have worked on the project.
• 1982 – The integration of thesaurus tools into word processors begins, allowing users to quickly access synonyms and enhance their writing digitally.
• 2003 – The rise of the internet leads to the development of dedicated online thesaurus platforms, such as Thesaurus.com, providing users instant access to vast collections of synonyms
• 2009 – The Historical Thesaurus Of The Oxford English Dictionary was published. Volume Two, the index, is longer than Volume One.
  • The HTOED provides a breadth of knowledge that is found in no other work and has more synonyms than any other thesaurus. The word “immediately,” for example, has 265 synonyms, ranging from ædre, which is only found in Old English, to yesterday, which is first recorded in the sense of ‘immediately’ in 1974.
  • It’s taken approximately 320,000 hours to complete the HTOED – that’s the equivalent of 176 years
• 2010s – The development and application of semantic search engine technologies improve the functionality of digital thesauri, enabling more context-aware synonym suggestions
• The Oxford Dictionary gives “thesauri” as the plural of “thesaurus”. The Cambridge Dictionary prefers “thesauruses”, saying “thesauri” is “formal”.
•  Curiously, Roget omits the word “bear” in the list of animals in his Thesaurus. But he does include the phrase “had it been a bear, it would have bitten you” under “Inattention”.
• Roget’s thesaurus lists the word “thesaurus” under the concepts of “list”, “word” and “store”.
• The HTOED provides a breadth of knowledge that is found in no other work and has more synonyms than any other thesaurus. The word immediately, for example, has 265 synonyms, ranging from ædre, which is only found in Old English, to yesterday, which is first recorded in the sense of ‘immediately’ in 1974.
  • The project has cost approximately $1.8million – roughly $1.25 per meaning
  • At just under 4,000 pages, the HTOED is the largest thesaurus in the world. It covers approximately 800,000 word meanings from Old English to the present day.
• With financial straits being an ever-present backdrop, one team member worked out how many pages of the OED could be recorded by a slip-maker within the lifetime of a single pencil (answer: 130)
• The Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE) is the largest thesaurus in the world.
  • It is the first historical thesaurus compiled for any of the world’s languages and contains 800,000 meanings for 600,000 words across 230,000 categories.
• The division between “words people” and “numbers people” is deep-seated. Many mathematicians may try to steer clear of thesauruses, and bibliophiles may avoid calculators, but the thesaurus is actually linked to a mathematical tool.
• Urban Dictionary helps people decipher the latest slang terms, but where should you go when you need a thesaurus of slang? Urban Thesaurus, of course. The site, which is not affiliated with Urban Dictionary, indexes millions of slang terms culled from slang dictionaries, then calculates usage correlations between the terms. Typing in the word money, for example, gives you an eclectic list of synonyms including scrilla, cheddar, mulah, coin, and bling.

Sources:

National Day Calendar

Express

OUPblog

Mental Floss

National Today

Days of the Year