Anchor Terms

About Anchor Terms

Anchor terms are contemporary definitions from authoritative lexicographic sources (such as OED, Merriam-Webster, or WordNet) that serve as reference points for semantic change analysis. These terms provide stable, well-documented baseline definitions for investigating diachronic semantic variation. Temporal evolution analysis is conducted in the Experiments section, where anchor definitions are systematically compared against historical attestations to identify and measure semantic drift patterns.