Roget’s Thesaurus

Isn’t this a thing of beauty?

Austin Kleon has written a post about the Roget’s Thesaurus that spurred me on to take immediate action to procure a copy for my personal library. I began my usual sourcing procedures, found it at Bokus.com (I was quite surprised to get it at a good deal in Sweden for SEK 386, roughly SGD49 or USD37), and now I have this 1.5 kg tome in my hands. It took less than a week to be delivered, which is not bad for Swedish standards considering the Roget’s Thesaurus is a non-Swedish book.

In this Austin Kleon’s longer post, he tells us briefly the history and unique features of Roget’s Thesaurus. It’s a book created by the Victorian polymath Peter Mark Roget to organize words in the English language by category rather than alphabetically. It’s designed to help users find the words to express an idea, rather than simply looking up the meaning of a word. I love the Ted Gioia quote Kleon has included: “Roget’s Thesaurus is an oddball philosophy of language masquerading as a reference book.”