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Roget's Thesaurus

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Roget's Thesaurus is a widely used English-language thesaurus, created in 1805 by Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869), British physician, natural theologian and lexicographer.

History

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It was released to the public on 29 April 1852.[1][page needed] Roget was inspired by the Utilitarian teachings of Jeremy Bentham and wished to help "those who are painfully groping their way and struggling with the difficulties of composition … this work processes to hold out a helping hand".[2] The Karpeles Library Museum houses the original manuscript in its collection.[3]

Roget's schema of classes and their subdivisions is based on the philosophical work of Leibniz (see Leibniz § Symbolic thought),[citation needed] itself following a long tradition of epistemological work starting with Aristotle. Some of Aristotle's Categories are included in Roget's first class, "abstract relations".

Content

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Roget described his thesaurus in the foreword to the first edition:

It is now nearly fifty years since I first projected a system of verbal classification similar to that on which the present work is founded. Conceiving that such a compilation might help to supply my own deficiencies, I had, in the year 1805, completed a classed catalogue of words on a small scale, but on the same principle, and nearly in the same form, as the Thesaurus now published.[4]

Roget's Thesaurus is composed of six primary classes.[5] Each class is composed of multiple divisions and then sections. This may be conceptualized as a tree containing over a thousand branches for individual "meaning clusters" or semantically linked words. Although these words are not strictly synonyms, they can be viewed as colours or connotations of a meaning or as a spectrum of a concept.[citation needed] One of the most general words is chosen to typify the spectrum as its headword, which labels the whole group.

Editions

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The original edition had 15,000 words and each successive edition has been larger,[3] with the most recent edition (the eighth) containing 443,000 words.[6] The book is updated regularly and each edition is heralded as a gauge to contemporary terms; but each edition keeps true to the original classifications established by Roget.[2] The name "Roget" is trademarked in parts of the world, such as the United Kingdom.[7] By itself, it is not protected in the United States, where use of the name "Roget" in the title of a thesaurus does not necessarily indicate any relationship to Roget directly; it has come to be seen as a generic thesaurus name.[8]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Hüllen[full citation needed]
  2. ^ a b How to be Really Well Informed in Minutes: All you need to know about everything that matters from the popular 'Briefing' columns. Croydon: Ebury Press. 2012. pp. 74–77. ISBN 978-0-09194-706-4.
  3. ^ a b "Roget's Thesaurus". Karcpeles Library. Archived from the original on 2009-12-28.
  4. ^ Lloyd (1982), p. xix.
  5. ^ "Table of contents". Archived from the original on March 16, 2013.
  6. ^ HarperCollins (November 5, 2019). "Roget's International Thesaurus, 8th Edition". Archived from the original on May 6, 2021. Retrieved October 17, 2020.
  7. ^ "Intellectual Property Office". GOV.UK. Archived from the original on November 5, 2012. Retrieved May 13, 2020.
  8. ^ Lloyd (1982), p. xiii, quote: "The name has become synonymous with the Thesaurus, yet Dr Roget himself is a shadowy figure."

Bibliography

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  • Baumgartner, Jason L.; Waugh, Timothy A. (2002), Erbacher, Robert F.; Chen, Philip C.; Groehn, Matti; Roberts, Jonathan C.; Wittenbrink, Craig M. (eds.), "Roget2000: A 2D Hyperbolic Tree Visualization of Roget's Thesaurus", Visualization and Data Analysis 2002, 4665, Bloomington, IN: School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University: 339, Bibcode:2002SPIE.4665..339B, doi:10.1117/12.458803, S2CID 893530
  • Emblen, D.L. (1969), "The Library of Peter Mark Roget", The Book Collector, 18 (4 (winter)): 449–469
  • Hüllen, Werner (2004), A History of Roget's Thesaurus: origins, development, and design, Oxford [England]: Oxford University Press, doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199254729.001.0001, ISBN 1-4237-8876-1
  • Hüllen, Werner (2009), Networks and knowledge in Roget's Thesaurus, Oxford: Oxford University Press, doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199553235.001.0001, ISBN 978-0-19-955323-5
  • Kendall, Joshua C. (2008), The Man Who Made Lists: love, death, madness, and the creation of Roget's Thesaurus, New York, ISBN 978-0-399-15462-1, OCLC 156902279{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  • Roget, Peter Mark (1982), Lloyd, Sue (ed.), Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, Harlow, Essex: Longman, ISBN 0-582-55635-X, OCLC 8546324
  • Roget, Peter Mark (1962) [1852], Dutch, Robert A. (ed.), The Original Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (Americanized ed.), New York: Longmans, Green & Co./Dell Publishing Co., Inc.
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