Roget's Thesaurus

Template:Short description Template:Italic title 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

It was released to the public on 29 April 1852.<ref>Taking as a starting point the preface to the first édition of this Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, Classified and Arranged so as to facilitate the Expression of Ideas, writen on april the 29th. See also Werner Hüllen, A History of Roget's Thesaurus: origins, development, and design, Oxford University Press, 2004, preface p. vii-x (before introduction) of the book cited infra.</ref> Dr Peter Mark Roget former secretary of the Royal Society 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 Template:Omission this work processes to hold out a helping hand".<ref name=":0">Template:Cite book</ref> The Karpeles Library Museum houses the original manuscript in its collection.<ref name=karpeles/>

Roget's schema of classes and their subdivisions is based on the philosophical work of Leibniz (see Template:Section link),Template: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

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

Roget's Thesaurus is composed of six primary classes.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> 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.Template:Citation needed One of the most general words is chosen to typify the spectrum as its headword, which labels the whole group.

Editions

The original edition had 15,000 words and each successive edition has been larger,<ref name=karpeles>Template:Cite web</ref> with the most recent edition (the eighth) containing 443,000 words.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> 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.<ref name=":0" /> The name "Roget" is trademarked in parts of the world, such as the United Kingdom Template:Citation needed. 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.Template:Sfnp

In 1952 the copyright belonging after Roget's death in 1869 to his son "John Lewis" Roget a lawyer then his grandson "Samuel Romilly" Roget a engineer passed to the original publishers, now known as Longman.<ref>John Lewis Roget (1828-1908) add an index and performs a major revision in 1879. Samuel Romilly Roget publishes his major contributions in 1936. Article "Roget's Thesaurus" in (Oxford) encyclopedia.com, external link infra.</ref> The first Penguin edition appeared in 1953 and the second designed par Robert A. Dutch in 1966.<ref>The Penguin Roget's thesaurus of English words and phrases, new edition completely revised, updated and abridged by Susan M. Lloyd, Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1984/1986 (paperback), 776 pages. Preface p. viii</ref> Susan M. Lloyd née Emmerson, former teacher in Birmingham and in Uganda, Master Philosophy degree at the University of East Anglia, edited the first revision for twenty years of Roget's Thesaurus, published by Longman in 1982. Betty Kirkpatrick resumes the revision of the Thesaurus in 1987.

See also

• Moby Thesaurus

Bibliography

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External links

• Roget's Thesaurus: The Original Manuscript at Karpeles Manuscript Library
• Searchable 1911 version hosted by the University of Chicago
• Roget's Thesaurus at Project Gutenberg
• Roget's Hyperlinked Thesaurus - (No longer maintained)
• ROGETS THESAURUS, encyclopedia.com
• Peter Mark Roget, britannica.com
• The Remarkable Roget's Thesaurus, merriam-webster.com