Words in Time and Place: Exploring Language Through the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary by David Crystal (review)

To say that David Crystal, the author or editor of more than one hundred books, is a prolific writer on the subject of the English language is a significant understatement. Crystal’s oeuvre ranges from large works, such as The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (2003), to smaller books which focus on a particular aspect of our language (such as texting, Shakespeare’s pronunciation, of the language of the King James Bible). Words in Time and Place: Exploring Language through the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is certainly one of his smaller efforts, which by no means should be taken to indicate that it is without charm or utility.

Words in Time is exactly what its title suggests: an examination of some portions of the English language as they are illustrated in the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED). For the few readers of this journal who are not familiar with this title, the HTOED is the exceedingly large thesaurus (almost 4,000 pages) compiled over a period of some forty-four years by researchers at the University of Glasgow, and which is based on the Oxford English Dictionary (as well as some material from the Thesaurus of Old English).

Published in print in 2009, the HTOED received considerable acclaim, although some reviewers found the indexing to be confusing (Görlach 2011, 195). With almost 800,000 words and 235,000 entry categories spread across a thousand years of English usage, it is not surprising that users would occasionally find looking up specific meanings difficult. The HTOED is now directly accessible through the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary, making searches considerably easier. Still, it presents a daunting amount of information for any but the most dedicated searcher of words. Many readers, particularly those who are not scholars, would do well to be introduced to this thesaurus through a smaller guide book.

David Crystal is a fitting author for such a vade mecum. He writes engagingly here, with a lightly erudite touch, and has come up with a rather ingenious way to explore the massive amount of lexical data in the book about which he is writing. Crystal restricted his examination to fifteen fairly narrow semantic fields from the HTOED (words for inns and hotels, fools, pop music, etc.), allowing him the luxury of showcasing in relative depth the thoroughness of treatment that was afforded to the language in the thesaurus about which he is writing.

Each chapter has a short preface, followed by a list of the words from the HTOED for that particular semantic field, occasionally divided into several small categories. The words are arranged chronologically in each group, and accompanied by a single explicatory paragraph, written by Crystal.

One wishes that Crystal had spent more time in his role as guide, as the nuggets that he supplies in the introductions to these chapters are often lovely, and not the sort of information that a user of either the OED or the HTOED is likely to find in those works. For instance, in the introduction to Chapter 6 (From dizzy to numpty: words for a fool) he writes, “Sound symbolism is a powerful explanatory principle in this semantic field. Almost half the words in the list below have an unclear or unknown etymology – a remarkable proportion.” He makes note as well of the high rate of certain phonetic patterns, such as oo, initial f’s and g’s, and final p’s in the list of words for a fool (86). In the introduction to his chapter on words for hotels and inns, Crystal provides an excellent explanation for the increase in such words (especially those of a foreign origin) in the years after 1600: England saw a period of relative peace, allowing increased foreign travel, and the travel writings...