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.