![]() His latest book is First Dads: Parenting and Politics from George Washington to Barack Obama (2016). Joshua Kendall is the author of The Man Who Made Lists: Love Death Madness and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus (Putnam, 2008). Roget’s has sold more than 40 million copies, and has become a proprietary eponym like Coke, Kleenex, or Google. Since first rolling off the presses of London’s Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans in June 1852, Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words And Phrases has emerged as one of the most recognizable books in the English language. Shortly before publication, Roget decided to insert an alphabetical index as an appendix, thus enabling readers to use the Thesaurus as a convention book of synonyms-without necessarily having to delve into its complex philosophical underpinnings. ![]() The purpose is to help readers find le mot juste for a given idea-say “being” or “reality” for existence. In that edition, the first entry is “Existence” (which falls under the first class, Abstract Relations). The 1000 headings of the 1852 edition were arranged not alphabetically but according to where a given idea fit within Roget’s classification system. Upon discovering that he had a couple too many, he numbered “Absence of Intellect” 450a and “Indiscrimination” 465a. The first edition actually contains 1002 concepts, but Roget was a stickler for symmetry. Just as his hero, the 18th century naturalist Carl Linnaeus divided animals into six classes, Roget divvied up his 1000 concepts as follows: Roget’s was a two-for-one: it put both a book of synonyms and a topic dictionary (a compendium of thematically arranged concepts) under one cover.īorrowing the principles of zoological classification, Roget arranged all knowledge-not just words. Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so to Assist in Literary Composition clearly bore the stamp of its creator. He would continue to tinker with his masterpiece until his death at the age of ninety in 1869, having watched over the publication of some 28 editions. Antonyms are expressions that mean the opposite of the. The still spry Roget worked nonstop for nearly four years to prepare the book for publication. Synonyms are expressions that have the same meaning as the idiom. However, it was not until his retirement from science in 1848, at the age of 69, that Roget took on the challenge of finishing the Thesaurus. Then working as a physician in Manchester, Roget managed to crank out this string of word lists in less than a year. Obsessed with words ever since he began studying Latin as a schoolboy, Roget completed a first draft of the Thesaurus (the Latin word for “treasure” or “treasury”) in 1805, when he was just 26. The organization of the book reflects the unique intelligence of the polymath that created it. With Roget’s, the user start with an idea and then keeps flipping through the book until he finds the word that best expresses it. ![]() With a dictionary, the user looks up a word to find its meaning. But Roget’s is essentially a reverse dictionary. We tend to think of a thesaurus as a collection of synonyms and antonyms. The 1852 Thesaurus divvied 1,000 concepts into six Linnaean classifications.
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