Today is Thesaurus Day! Peter Mark Roget, the author of Roget’s Thesaurus, was born on this day in 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!
Did you know that the word “thesaurus” is Latin for “treasure”? Roget’s original treasure trove of information included 15,000 words organized into six 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 as opposed to alphabetically.
Pull out your thesaurus, use some new words, and stretch your vocabulary in honor of Thesaurus Day!