A History of Roget's Thesaurus

Roget's Thesaurus was first published in 1852 and has come to be one of the most famous and widely-used reference works in the world. This is the first account of its genesis.

Werner Hllen contends that synonymy (words with similar meanings) is a feature of language without which we could not communicate. He describes the development in the theory and practice of synonymy from Plato to the seventeenth century, when the first English synonym dictionaries began to appear. Roget's Thesaurus, the first synonym dictionary arranged in topical order, represents an enormously significant peak in this development. This book exposes the conceptual framework behind the Thesaurus and shows how it can be interpreted as a predecessor of linguistic semantics.