Peter Mark Roget
Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases
1894 · 728 pages
- Author
- Peter Mark Roget
- Edition
- New edition, enlarged and improved, partly from the author’s notes, and with a full index, by John Lewis Roget
- Published
- London and New York, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894
- Pages
- 728
- File
- DjVu, 30.3 MB
- Text search
- yes
- Rights
- public domain
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About the book
Peter Mark Roget was a London physician and scientist who, as a young man in 1805, began keeping a classified list of words to help his own writing. Nearly fifty years later, after retiring, he expanded it into the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, first published in 1852. The book has been in print ever since, and “Roget” has become almost a common noun for a dictionary of synonyms.
Unlike an ordinary dictionary, the Thesaurus is arranged by ideas rather than by spelling. Roget sorted the vocabulary into six great classes: abstract relations, space, matter, the intellect, the will, and feelings and morals, and divided them into about a thousand numbered headings, often setting a word group beside its opposite. A writer looking for the right word starts from the idea and finds the alternatives gathered in one place; the alphabetical index leads to the heading from any single word.
After Roget’s death in 1869 his son, John Lewis Roget, took over the work, adding the words and phrases his father had collected in the margins of his own copy.
Contents
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About this edition
A new edition published in 1894 by Longmans, Green, and Co. of London and New York, enlarged and improved by John Lewis Roget partly from his father’s notes, and printed by Spottiswoode and Co. It contains Roget’s preface to the first edition, the editor’s preface, the author’s introduction, the plan of classification with a tabular synopsis of categories, the thesaurus itself in two columns and a long index. The scanned copy belonged to the library of the Royal College of Physicians, whose stamp appears on the title page. The scan has a text layer.
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Source
A scan from the Wikimedia Foundation's open projects. The book is in the public domain: free to read, download and share.