The European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST) is a broad-based, multilingual thesaurus for the social sciences. It is owned and published by the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA). ELSST will be used for data discovery within CESSDA and will thus facilitate access to data resources across Europe, independent of domain, resource, language or vocabulary. The thesaurus covers the core social science disciplines: politics, sociology, economics, education, law, crime, demography, health, employment, information and communication technology and, increasingly, environmental science. This guide covers the first release of the thesaurus to the CESSDA ELSST platform in November 2020.