First scholarships funded by Historical Thesaurus awarded
Published: 7 October 2010
Four postgraduate English Language students have accepted fee-waiver bursaries to pursue their studies funded by royalties from the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary.
The publishing success of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary has provided sufficient royalties to provide fee-waiver bursaries for four postgraduate students who are beginning to pursue their studies in English Language.
Leonie Dunlop (23) and Thomas White (22) from Glasgow and Namiko Kikusawa (27) from Tokyo and Daria Izdebska (25) from Kraków take up the scholarships for the academic year 2010-11. 
Sales of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) have exceeded all expectations. Publication of the Historical Thesaurus last year led to an almost instant sell-out, speedy reprinting, and the beginning of a flow of royalties into the University of Glasgow. The acclaimed publication is now on its 4th print.
Following a longstanding agreement among members of the HTOED editorial team, royalties have been devoted to furthering research in English Language through the scholarship fund. The scholarships offer exceptional students from any university the opportunity to pursue research in any of the subject areas, both historical and modern, covered by the Department of English Language, and take the form of a fee waiver for the first year of research. The scholarships are named in honour of the four editors of HTOED: Christian Kay (pictured), Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels and Irené Wotherspoon.
On current predictions of future royalties - including the US where it swiftly sold out - the Department expects to continue to be able to offer up to four scholarships a year.
The world’s first historical thesaurus in any language, The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary was published - after 44 years of painstaking scholarship by the English Language department of the University of Glasgow - on 22 October 2009 to universal acclaim.
The brainchild of Professor Michael Samuels in 1965, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is the culmination of thousands of hours work by hundreds of research assistants, postgraduate students, university staff and volunteers.
The awe-inspiring completed work contains nearly 800,000 meanings, organised into more than 236,000 categories and subcategories collected together in 4,500 pages in two volumes.
Randolph Quirk, Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature, University College London said: “This book is a magnificent achievement of quite extraordinary value. It is perhaps the single most significant tool ever devised for investigating semantic, social and intellectual history.”
Further information:
Martin Shannon, Senior Media Relations Officer
University of Glasgow Tel: 0141 330 8593
Oxford University Press
www.oxfordonline.com/ht
First published: 7 October 2010
<< October