Historical Thesaurus of English | Hacker News Reader

Historical Thesaurus of English

ht.ac.uk

35 pointshkhn4 comments

Words worth looking up because oh man do they change meaning include: nice, buxom, and lewd.

My first exposure to this with any rigor was in high school. We were given one of shakespeare’s sonnets to analyze and the first thing we had to to was go to the library and look up literally every word in the sonnet in the OED and consider only those senses of the word that dated to date of composition or prior. A LOT of words didn’t mean to shakespeare what you think they mean now!

I remember learning that “nothing” was slang for a woman’s downstairs privates, which made Much Ado About Nothing seem like a really clever title.

It is at least a triple pun, yep!

This exercise was more to do with the actual ordinary "plain" word meanings. In 1605, "nice" had the primary sense of "precise" or "careful and tidy", and if you don't know that this sentence, for example, doesn't parse:

  Old fashions please me best; I am not so nice / To change true rules for odd inventions.

So many times making names for a DND campaign, I have regretted that regular thesauruses don't show archaic synonyms.

This is perfect. I am totally going to use this.

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