Dressed to Kill: The Merry Widow Project stars 12 big-name actors and actresses. But our 'star' is the corset thesaurus. We feature three displays of the corset thesaurus.

Introduction to the Thesaurus and User Guide

Using the Thesaurus - or what is a thesaurus Anyway?
For many of us, thesaurus is synonymous with Roget's Thesaurus - a list of words and synonyms. But a thesaurus is more than that. A thesaurus is controlled vocabulary arranged in a meaningful manner. This thesaurus will help you to choose and understand corset related terms and their relationships to each other. The advantages of using this thesaurus are that it will help you to communicate with others who are involved with corsetry, and will enable you to use terms consistently. It will also serve as a searching aid.

Typography
All preferred terms are in capitals. Non-preferred or entry terms are in lower case. Where the non-preferred term is a proper name the first letter is capitalized. Node labels are in lower case and enclosed in angle brackets. Diacritical marks are not displayed in our thesaurus.

Spelling
To promote ease of access for the majority of our current and future users, we have chosen to use American spelling for our entry and preferred thesaurus terms. Some non-English terms are included, and in these cases they remain in their native spellings.

Pluralization
While as a general rule preferred terms are plurals, occasionally they are not.

Search Strategy
You will probably want to search with truncation, by inserting a '*' after the root of the term. For example, entering the search term 'corset*' would retrieve all items described with 'corset', 'corsets', 'corsetry' and 'corseting'.

This means that you might retrieve items you had not intended to retrieve. A good strategy would be to scan the retrieved items for the term you want, and then use that as your search term (or click on it). Preferred terms are the best terms to use in searching. Entering non-preferred terms will lead you to the preferred terms. You do not need to enter diacritical marks or punctuation in searching.

Domain
This thesaurus has been designed for MMM and contains terms relating to corsets as they relate to the film. This corset module contains terms relating to nineteenth century corsets, types of corset, their parts, materials and historical colors. The larger MMM thesaurus also includes modules on all of their film productions and merchandise.

Top of Page

SOME DEFINITIONS

Descriptor is a term chosen as the preferred word for a concept in the thesaurus. Descriptors may include the following information and relationships: Scope Note (SN), Used For (UF), Use (USE), Narrower Terms (NT), Broader Terms (BT) and Related Terms (RT). Definitions of these terms and abbreviations can be found below.

Preferred Term - descriptors the user is recommended to use, as opposed to non-preferred, or entry terms, which are synonyms for the preferred term. Example:
foundation garments
USE CORSETS

Non-Preferred Term - the user is advised not to enter the term, but to use the associated preferred term instead.

Example:
foundation garments
USE CORSETS

USE
Use - when the same concept can be expressed by a number of terms, one term is chosen as the preferred term, which is also known as the descriptor. Example:
merry widows
USE CORSETS

UF: Used For
An abbreviation that directs the user to the synonyms for the preferred term.
GORES
UF gussets

BT: Broader Term
A superordinate term encompassing one or several terms beneath it in the hierarchy. Example:
LACING
BT FASTENERS

NT: Narrower Term
A subordinate term placed below a higher level term in the hierarchy. Example:
FASTENERS
NT LACING

RT: Related Term
A descriptor that is semantically but not hierarchically linked to another descriptor in a thesaurus. Example:
BONING MATERIALS
RT BONES

Scope Note
An explanatory note accompanying a term, which differentiates between terms that have similar meanings and provides usage advice for the users, indexer, or searcher. Example:
BONES:
SN Used for stiffening and shaping corsets

Parenthetical Qualifiers
A defining term used to distinguish words that are spelled the same but have different meanings. Explanatory qualifiers are enclosed in parentheses. Example:
horn (animal)

Top Term
A term at the highest possible level in the hierarchy, provided primarily for classification purposes.

Top of Page

Thesaurus Displays

Alphabetical Display
This is the primary display. It is an alphabetical sequence of terms in the thesaurus. The terms in the list are both preferred and non-preferred terms. We have included the entire alphabetical display in the corset thesaurus.

Top Term Display
The top term display arranges top terms alphabetically with each of the top terms followed by all of its narrower terms arranged hierarchically on various levels. This display affords a quick way of gleaning the basic relationships in the whole thesaurus. We have included a sample of the top term display for the corset thesaurus.

Hierarchical Display
The hierarchical display arranges terms alphabetically with all of its child, parent, and grandparent relationships. This display clearly reveals all the relationships between terms. We have included a sample of the hierarchical display for the corset thesaurus.

Rotated or Permuted Display
A rotated or permuted display, which is not shown in our website, gives access to every word in the thesaurus. This display arranges each and every term within a listing as an index term. For example, the term 'corset covers' would be listed twice: once under 'corset' and once under 'covers'.