Tracing jealousy and envy: A semantic journey through English with HTOED

Abstract This study offers a diachronic analysis of jealousy‑ and envy‑related vocabulary in English, drawing on 95 lexical items from the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary ( HTOED ). While research on emotion concepts has traditionally focused on synchronic patterns and metaphorical structuring, comparatively little attention has been paid to the historical development of these notions. The present investigation adopts a systematic, thesaurus‑based approach to trace how jealousy and envy have been semantically encoded across the history of English. HTOED , integrated with OED data and supported by its chronological organization of semantic fields, provides a uniquely comprehensive resource for examining lexical diversity, semantic change and shifting conceptual associations. The analysis highlights the breadth of jealousy‑ and envy‑related expressions, ranging from early medical or colour‑based metaphors (e.g. jaundice, yellowness ) to figurative idioms ( green‑eyed monster, sour grapes ) and more recent slang formations ( player‑hater ). The dataset encompasses nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and idiomatic phrases, revealing how jealousy and envy have been framed as emotional states, behavioural tendencies, interpersonal dynamics and culturally embedded metaphors. To connect the diachronic findings to present‑day English, the study supplements HTOED data with evidence from contemporary corpora, enabling an assessment of the current productivity, distribution, and semantic tendencies of jealousy‑ and envy‑related expressions. Overall, the findings demonstrate that jealousy and envy have been conceptualized through a rich interplay of bodily imagery, moral evaluation, social comparison and cultural narrative.