‘What’s that?’ asked my husband, looking at my laptop. ‘Fibonacci fossilised?’ His question made no sense, but I saw what he meant. I was looking at a diagram of ‘the fabulous semantic engine, a sort of virtual sausage machine’ that I mentioned last week.
The diagram was circular, like a compass-rose with 37 points. Each point was connected to each of the others, like a church column to vaulting tracery. It is a metaphor map: the points represent categories for pigeonholing every word in English over the past 13 centuries. An underlying 415 semantic categories sort 793,742 word forms.
It is not like some delusion in which the secrets of the pyramids are transmitted mentally via television, but an analysis of the Historical Thesaurus derived from the Oxford English Dictionary. The Historical Thesaurus is the world’s first attempt at a comprehensive semantic classification of all words in the written record of a language.
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