World’s largest thesaurus finally off the press

GLASGOW—The world’s largest thesaurus has been published after more than 40 years of work by the English Language department of Glasgow University. It rolled off the press last October 22 and is now available for sale.

The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary has nearly 800,000 meanings, organized into more than 236,000 categories and subcategories. Its 4,500 pages are published in two volumes by Oxford University Press.

Professor Christian Kay, 69, one of four co-editors, says that the new thesaurus differs with Roget’s Thesaurus in that the former goes right back to the beginnings of English.
“In addition to getting the words arranged by their meanings, we provide the dates during which they were current in English," she said. “We include obsolete words which are no longer in use or are only found in very special contexts.”

The project, started in 1965, was the brainchild of Professor Michael Samuels of Glasgow University. The finished work is the result of thousands of hours of work by hundreds of research assistants, postgraduate students, university staff and volunteers.

The draft thesaurus was almost destroyed in a fire in 1978, but despite the building being gutted, a metal filing cabinet protected the files. In 1980, the project was nearly completed, but the team decided to include words from updated versions of the Oxford English Dictionary. This added almost 30 years more work to the project.

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Children’s schooling should start at six, a British study recommends

Schoolchildren should not start formal lessons until they turn six, and Sats should be scrapped to relieve the damaging pressure England's young pupils face, the biggest inquiry into primary education for 40 years concludes today.

In a damning indictment of Labour’s education record since 1997, the Cambridge University-led review accuses the government of introducing an educational diet "even narrower than that of the Victorian elementary schools".

It claims that successive Labour ministers have intervened in England’s classrooms on an unprecedented scale, controlling every detail of how teachers teach in a system that has “Stalinist overtones.” It says they have exaggerated progress, narrowed the curriculum by squeezing out space for history, music and arts, and left children stressed-out by the testing and league table system.

The review is the biggest independent inquiry into primary education in four decades, based on 28 research surveys, 1,052 written submissions and 250 focus groups. It was undertaken by 14 authors, 66 research consultants and a 20-strong advisory committee at Cambridge University, led by Professor Robin Alexander, one of the most experienced educational academics in the country.

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How brain training games “give children a grade boost”

By Fiona Macrae, Daily Mail.co.uk

Simple brain training games can vastly improve children's school grades within a matter of weeks, research shows. A study found that games designed to improve memory increased literacy, numeracy, and IQ.

Some youngsters benefited so much from brain training they shot from the bottom to the top of the class, the British Science Festival was told this week. In contrast, other commercially available programmes have failed to make the grade when subjected to scientific scrutiny.

Tracy Alloway, the brains behind the JungleMemory computer programme, believes it could also give adults a workout for their grey matter, and help stave off memory loss and dementia in old age.

The programme - billed as the first brain training package to be clinically proven to improve grades - is available to all online. It works by boosting 'working memory', in which information is stored before being manipulated mentally.

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