Mentions of the word "drought" in articles published by British broadsheet newspapers between 1990-2014. The asterisk () is a wildcard to indicate that the search considered different forms of the search term: drought, droughts, hyphenated words (e.g. drought-resistant), or adjectival occurrences (droughty). The following newspapers are included, in their weekday or Sunday publications: The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian/The Observer, The Independent, The Herald, The Scotsman. Historic Droughts was a four year (2014 – 2018), £1.5m project funded by the UK Research Councils, aiming to develop a cross-disciplinary understanding of past drought episodes that have affected the United Kingdom (UK), with a view to developing improved tools for managing droughts in future. Drought and water scarcity (DWS) events are significant threats to livelihoods and wellbeing in many countries, including the United Kingdom (UK). Parts of the UK are already water-stressed and are facing a wide range of pressures, including an expanding population and intensifying exploitation of increasingly limited water resources. In addition, many regions may become significantly drier in future due to environmental changes, all of which implies major challenges to water resource management. However, DWS events are not simply natural hazards. There are also a range of socio-economic and regulatory factors that may influence the course of droughts, such as water consumption practices and abstraction licensing regimes. Consequently, if DWS events are to be better managed, there is a need for a more detailed understanding of the links between hydrometeorological and social systems during droughts. With this research gap in mind, the Historic Droughts project aimed to develop an interdisciplinary understanding of drought from a range of different perspectives. Based on an analysis of information from a wide range of sectors (hydrometeorological, environmental, agricultural, regulatory, social and cultural), the project characterised and quantified the history of drought and water scarcity events since the late 19th century. The Historic Droughts project involved eight institutions across the UK: the British Geological Survey the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Cranfield University, the University of Exeter, HR Wallingford, Lancaster University, the Met Office, and the University of Oxford.

The entries included in this inventory were drawn from a set of 4,986 newspaper texts (3,734,943 words) making reference to drought or water scarcity, published by British broadsheet papers between 01/01/1990 and 31/12/2014. These texts were collected from a news aggregator service (LexisNexis), considering the printed versions of all major British broadsheets, in their weekday and Sunday publications. These were: The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian/The Observer, The Independent, The Herald, The Scotsman. To retrieve individual texts from the selected newspapers, we used the following set of query terms: drought OR water scarcity OR water shortage OR hosepipe ban OR water {cut} off OR water rationing. The asterisk () is a wildcard, indicating that our search considered the different forms of the selected terms. This inventory dataset excludes: (i) metaphorical references to drought such as those related to sporting achievements (e.g. goal, trophy or scoring droughts) and finance (credit, mortgage droughts) and (ii) references to drought events outside the UK. Users should note that in addition to references to drought events that have affected the UK, it contains general references to drought that were not linked to any particular event such as references to drought-resistant plants, climate change, and also cultural events (films, books, etc).