If you get stuck trying to find the right word in Maltese, author Dwayne Ellul’s painstaking work may come in very handy when it is finally published.

Mr Ellul compiled 12,000 headwords and synonyms manually into an index to come up with the first Maltese-to-Maltese thematic thesaurus.

Mr Ellul and his master’s supervisor, Manwel Mifsud, looked at 40 Maltese and English vocabulary books, concluding that the thesaurus should be split into themes related to people and the environment around them.

“I could not cover every theme under the sun, since this is only a master’s thesis. However, I decided to look at the most basic and important themes,” Mr Ellul said, adding that the thesaurus had a thematic macrostructure so that it could help people write better in Maltese.

There are six themes: family and friends; the body and its care; physical description; character description; sentiments and emotions; and life’s phases. Each theme is then split into further sub-themes.

The thesaurus will also include each headword and a sentence that illustrates its use. It is set to be published towards the end of next year.

Mr Ellul has been compiling the book since 2014, having won an education grant scheme. The thesaurus is intended to help users find alternatives to the words and phrases they already know to help them better express themselves.

Mr Ellul knew, for example, of 37 alternatives in the Maltese language for the word oħxon (fat), he said, adding that he wanted to preserve the language.

“My interest in Maltese is wide-ranging but I always liked the Maltese lexicon,” he remarked, saying that, as a Maltese teacher, he witnessed the deterioration of the language every day.

After using a system known as rapid word collection to gather words together, Mr Ellul split the words into concepts and then manually placed together those linked by a particular theme.

Rapid word collection is a system that asks questions, prompting participants to associate words with each other. Once the questions are answered, the responses from participants yield entries that can be classified into different themes.