This book draws heavily upon a number of key scholarly resources for the study of etymology. Most valuable have been the detailed and egregious—and here I’m using the word in its earliest sense of ‘excellent’ (literally ‘standing out from the flock’)—etymologies supplied by the Oxford English Dictionary, which are the starting point for anyone interested in researching the histories of English words. I have drawn extensively upon these throughout this book, supplementing and cross-referencing them with various other etymological dictionaries cited below. Another resource that I have plundered shamelessly is the Historical Thesaurus of the OED, which organizes the OED entries according to their meanings. Thesaurus is from a Greek word meaning ‘storehouse’; it was initially used of dictionaries and encyclopedias—the current sense was established following the publication of a Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (1852) by the physician Peter Mark Roget, whose name is now synonymous with this book of synonyms. The Greek word thesaurus is also the origin of English treasure, a word that better captures the value of the eximious, prestantious, and supernacular Historical Thesaurus of the OED.
Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition (in progress), www.oed.com
Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, ed. C. Kay et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); available online at https://ht.ac.uk
Barnhart, Robert K. (ed.), Chambers Dictionary of Etymology (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1999).
Crystal, David, Words in Time and Place: Exploring Language through the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Crystal, David, Words, Words, Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Durkin, Philip, Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Durkin, Philip, The Oxford Guide to Etymology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Gilliver, Peter, The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Hitchings, Henry, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English (London: John Murray, 2008).
Horobin, Simon, The English Language: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Hughes, Geoffrey, A History of English Words (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
Hughes, Geoffrey, Words in Time: A Social History of English Vocabulary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).
Jones, Peter, Quid Pro Quo: What the Romans Really Gave the English Language (London: Atlantic Books, 2016).
Liberman, Anatoly, Word Origins . . . and How We Know Them (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Onions, C. T., G. W. S. Friedrichsen, and R. W. Burchfield (eds.), The Oxford Dictionary of Etymology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).
Simpson, John, The Word Detective. A Life in Words: From Serendipity to Selfie (London: Little, Brown, 2016).