Peter Roget, the man who created Roget’s Thesaurus was born in England in 1779. He was a physician and he worked as a doctor for most of his life. Like other intellectuals of his generation, he was a man of many interests and he was proficient in a variety of subjects.
He invented a slide rule for performing difficult mathematical calculations like finding the roots and powers of numbers, and developed a method of water filtration that is still used today. He wrote papers on a variety of topics, and he was one of the contributors to the early Encyclopaedia Britannica.
He retired from his medical practice when he was 61 years old, and decided to devote his retirement to publishing a system of classifying words into groups based on their meanings. Other scholars had published books of synonyms before, but Roget wanted to assemble something more comprehensive.
He organized words into six categories: abstract relations, space, matter, intellect, volition, sentient and moral powers. Within each category, there were several subcategories. It took him twelve years to complete, and he finally published his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases in 1852. He was 73 years old at the time.
He chose the word thesaurus because it means treasury in Greek. This treasure of words came with an index that made it easy for readers to find the synonyms that they were looking for.
Roget’s Thesaurus, which is often described as a reverse dictionary has become one of the most popular reference books of all time. It is one of the most significant lexicographical achievements in the history of the English language, and it has been helping people find the perfect word to describe what they want to say for more than 150 years.
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