The new historical thesaurus, left, and what a thesaurus looks like inside

Background: Enormous, capacious, skelping 還有 vast – 這些詞語僅僅是單詞 large 在即將發行的，迄今最大的同義詞詞典里289個同意詞語里的幾個代表。Thesaurus 意思是同義詞詞典。The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary 里共有詞語60萬條歷代詞語，這些詞語是按照日期和意思來分類的。經過40余年的整理編寫后，這本巨型同義詞詞典即將問世。

Questions: 請在聽下面錄音的時候試著回答這些問題。這是一個用來幫助你提高聽力技能的練習。

1. When will the thesaurus be published?

2. How old is Professor Kay?

3. Does Professor Kay think the book will be valuable to scholars of linguistics?

4. How many years' work was lost in the fire?

Historical Thesaurus to be Published 巨型歷代同義詞詞典

It’s the world's first historical thesaurus, grouping words by meaning and by date. And it survived fire, lack of funds and the death of some of its founders.

Tomorrow the work will finally be unveiled to academics prior to its publication in October.

Professor Christian Kay of the University of Glasgow began work on the project as a 28-year-old research assistant. She's now 69 and thinks it will be invaluable to scholars not just of linguistics but of cultural and social history.

Professor Kay:

"You know, if you're interested in something like clothes, it's very interesting to see what people have been wearing for the last 1,300 years. So I was looking at a whole list of words to do with trousers and there were words that would never have occurred to you probably that these words meant trousers."

That's where a thesaurus beats a dictionary, she says. But it's much harder work to compile. In the early days they simply wrote the words on slips of paper and grouped them in different ways.

Professor Kay remembers the dreadful day when the building caught fire and they nearly lost ten years' work. Fortunately the slips were in metal filing cabinets and survived.

Now all that work, and all those words, can be shared with the world.

GLOSSARY 詞匯表 (收聽發音, 請單擊英語單詞)

Answers

1. When will the thesaurus be published?

It will be published in October.

2. How old is Professor Kay?

She is 69.

3. Does Professor Kay think the book will be valuable to scholars of linguistics?

Yes, she thinks it will be invaluable. Invaluable means 無價的.

4. How many years' work was lost in the fire?

They nearly lost ten years' work that day, but it survived because it was stored in metal filing cabinets.