![]() Legal English, with its liking for old French terms, preferred to turn it into English in a different way a legal textbook of 1567 explained that valuable abandoned property belonged to the queen and was called treasure-trove. This was gradually Anglicised into treasure found. After the Norman Conquest it existed alongside the Anglo-Norman tresor trové. The Latin thesaurus inventus continued to be used until the end of the medieval period. And Latin inventus could as much mean discovered as invented. But thesaurus in Latin could mean a treasury and the concept of a book being a storehouse of knowledge has led to the word being used in English at least since the sixteenth century. The Latin was thesaurus inventus, which strikes modern non-Latinists as peculiar, since for us a thesaurus is a special form of dictionary, while to invent is to create something new. ![]() The idea that valuables that had been abandoned or hidden by persons unknown could be claimed by the state goes back at least to Roman times. They asserted, and the Guardian’s style guide agrees, that trove may not be used on its own, but must always form part of the compound noun treasure-trove. An item in the Corrections and Clarifications column on Monday 2 March reported that grammar pedants (tactfully described there as “linguistic purists”) had been upset at the use of the phrase Snowden trove for the thousands of documents leaked by Edward Snowden. The Guardian was a minor treasure-trove in early March 2015 for enquirers into matters of English language. ![]()
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