After more than 150 years at the top, Roget’s Thesaurus has finally met its match. The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, which comes out this August, is 44 years in the making and will be the largest thesaurus when published.  The Historical Thesaurus not only has over 800,000 meanings but it also provides a chronological history of words. So now you can see just how slang words became slang or how curses became curses. However, the cut-off date for words was 2003 so don’t expect to see ‘tweets’ in the collection. Nevertheless, the Historical Thesaurus allows for a remarkable insight into the cultural growth of English speaking people.

    Check out the history of the word Trousers (which also seems to be a case study on Victorian prudishness) here or click here  to learn more about the tumultuous history behind this gargantuan thesaurus