Interesting thought on semantic time travel:
Whereas a dictionary makes it possible to follow the history of a word, a historical thesaurus — the H.T.O.E.D. claims to be the world’s first, in any language — makes it possible to follow the history of a meaning. It’s like watching an actor try on new costumes and shed old ones, or like cruising down a river that in one stretch narrows to a rapids and at another broadens to a marsh. With a little effort, a historical thesaurus can even serve as a vehicle for a kind of linguistic time travel. “For any given period in the past,” the editors write, “the user should be able to ascertain the exact state of the vocabulary (i.e., the ‘lexical system’) which existed at that time.”
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