Thesaurus has the final word

A Thesaurus containing the world's most complete collection of word meanings will finally be published after nearly 45 years.

The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary will contain almost every English word.

It includes nearly 800,000 meanings, arranged into more than 236,000 categories and organised in a similar structure to Roget's Thesaurus.

Professor Christian Kay, one of four co-editors, has devoted almost her whole career to the tome. Work on the book began in 1965. Professor Kay, of Glasgow University, said her favourite words include "spangheu", meaning "to cause a frog or toad to fly in the air".