Copyright and conditions of use
The database of the Historical Thesaurus of English is copyright of the University of Glasgow, as is the data in the printed Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. This site makes available limited data from this database to you for non-commercial research purposes (such as private reference, personal research, background research for authors, and the provision of teaching materials). You may not use the material on this site for commercial or for-profit purposes.
We are not opposed to commercial use of Historical Thesaurus data, as outlined on our page regarding licensing – but this site cannot be used for those purposes. Please contact us to discuss commercialization opportunities for this data, which we can provide in conjunction with our partners at Oxford University Press.
Regardless of your purpose, you are not permitted to use this site to gain access to a significant amount of Historical Thesaurus data. Only limited quantities of data can be made available through this website, although the amount which can be accessed is more than sufficient for almost all research purposes. Should you be involved in a research project which requires a substantial amount of Thesaurus data, please see this page. It is explicitly prohibited to use this website to systematically download large amounts of data.
Finally, beyond limited extracts of up to a few hundred words which are necessary for your research or teaching, you may not reproduce, copy or transmit any part of the data on this site without our prior permission in writing.
We safeguard our copyright of this data as all royalties and donations from the Historical Thesaurus which are received by Glasgow are used for postgraduate studentships and to support research into the English language.