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Roget’s thesaurus was created by Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869), a British physician and lexicographer, in 1805.1Information is mostly drawn from the Wikipedia entry for Roget’s Thesaurus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roget%27s_Thesaurus [30.11.2020] Roget was inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarian teaching. He wished to help “those who are painfully groping their way and struggling with the difficulties of composition […] this work processes to hold out a helping hand.”[oes_note]cf. How to be Really Well Informed in Minutes: All you need to know about everything that matters from the popular ‘Briefing’ columns. Croydon: Ebury Press. 2012. pp. 74–77.[/oes_note] The first edition of the now widely used English-language thesaurus was published in 1852 by Longmans, London, covering 15,000 words. 2cf. 3 Publication History of Roget’s Thesaurus, http://www.roget.org/Tabular_History2.htm [30.11.2020] The most recent editions (the eighth) contains 443,000 words. Each edition follows the original classifications established by Roget:
“Roget’s Thesaurus is composed of six primary classes. Each class is composed of multiple divisions and then sections. This may be conceptualized as a tree containing over a thousand branches for individual “meaning clusters” or semantically linked words. Although these words are not strictly synonyms, they can be viewed as colours or connotations of a meaning or as a spectrum of a concept. One of the most general words is chosen to typify the spectrum as its headword, which labels the whole group.
Roget’s schema of classes and their subdivisions is based on the philosophical work of Leibniz, itself following a long tradition of epistemological work starting with Aristotle. Some of Aristotle´s Categories are included in Roget’s first class “abstract relations.” 3Quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roget%27s_Thesaurus [30.11.2020]