Happy Thesaurus Day

Peter Mark Roget, the author of Roget’s Thesaurus, was born on January 18, 1779. In 1840, Roget retired from a successful career in medicine and spent the rest of his life working on “Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases.” He published his dictionary of synonyms in 1852. Since then, it has never been out of print.

The word “thesaurus” is Latin for 'treasure'. Roget’s original information included 15,000 words organized into primary categories, existence, relation, quantity, number, and time. Today the book boasts over 230,000 words, but it is still organized by ideas and concepts.