Re: OED Historical Thesaurus published (22/10/2009)

Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz> wrote or quoted:

Roget gives us the present day English vocabulary arranged by semantic
fields. You start with a word, look up its semantic category (a nested
hierarchy with labels like "1.2.23.14"), look that up and you will find
your word together with all its near-synonyms or closely related (by
meaning) words. The classic task for Roget is "I want a word that means
something like 'insist', but a little different..." or "I don't want to
keep on using 'insist' -- how about a word that means roughly the same,
for variety?"

  Here in Berlin, we call those kinds of dictionaries for
  German "dictionary of synonyms" when they list words along
  with their synonyms.

  In California, from what I can tell, folks usually call this
  kind of thing a "thesaurus." The word exists in German too,
  but it's not used as often in this context.

  On top of that, we've got dictionaries that organize the German
  vocabulary by "by meaning groups", basically grouping words by
  how closely related their meanings are. (That kind of thing would
  probably be called a "thesaurus" in the Golden State too.)

  I'm not hip to anything like that specifically for older forms
  of German, but you might be able to get somewhere by doing
  a full-text search in dictionaries from those earlier periods
  as a workaround. Or you could always pick the brain of a chatbot!

User:
|I don't want to keep on using "insist" – how about a word
|that means roughly the same, for variety?

Chatbot:
|Here are some synonyms for "insist" that you can use for
|variety:
. . .

User:
|What did people use in older states of the English language
|to say "insist"?

Chatbot:
. . .
|Astandan - to stand firm, persist
|Geornlice biddan - to earnestly request or demand
. . .