Roget's Thesaurus
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Roget's Thesaurus is a widely-used English thesaurus, created by Dr. Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869) in 1805 and released to the public on 29 April 1852. The original edition had 15,000 words, and each new edition has been larger. The Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum houses the original manuscript in its collection.
The name "Roget" is trademarked in parts of the world[citation needed], such as the United Kingdom. By itself, it is not protected in the United States of America, where use of the name "Roget" in the title of a thesaurus does not necessarily indicate any relationship to Dr. Roget; it has come to be seen as a generic thesaurus name[1], like "Webster" for dictionaries.[citation needed]
Dr. 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.[2]
Roget's Thesaurus is composed of six primary classes. 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. These words are not exactly synonyms, but can be viewed as colours or connotations of a meaning or as a spectrum of a concept. One of the most general words is chosen to typify the spectrum as its headword, which labels the whole group.
Roget's schema of classes and their subdivisions is based on the philosophical work of Leibniz (see Leibniz — Symbolic thought), 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".
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[edit] Roget's Thesaurus as a classification system
Roget's Thesaurus can be seen as a classification system. The Wikipedia "category schemes"[1] are based on the clarification system of Roget's Thesaurus, as evidenced by the outline from the 1911 US edition, now in the public domain.
[edit] In popular culture
The Chaser's War on Everything wrote a segment about Roget's Thesaurus on the week marking the 150th anniversary of the book. It involved the song I am Thesaurus (sung to the tune of The Beatles' I Am The Walrus) performed by the Chaser team "starring" Roget (Andrew Hansen) on the piano.
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Roget, Peter Mark [1852] (1962, 1982), Lloyd, Susan M., ed., Roget's Thesaurus, Burnt Mill, Harlow, Essex: Longman Group Limited, ISBN 0 582 55635 X
- Roget, Peter Mark [1852] (1962), Dutch, Robert A., O.B.E., ed., The Original Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (Americanized edition), New York, NY, USA: Longmans, Green & Co./Dell Publishing Co., Inc.
