Peter Mark Roget (1779 – 1869) is best known as the author of Roget’s Thesaurus. Also sometimes called a “synonym dictionary,” a thesaurus is a reference work that compiles and lists synonyms of words. It may also contain antonyms.
Synonym dictionaries actually have a long history. Philo of Byblos (64 – 141) compiled the first known thesaurus. The word, by the way, comes from the Greek word for “treasury” or “storehouse.” Roget, in fact, was inspired to develop his thesaurus after reading an earlier synonym dictionary – and being thoroughly unimpressed with it.
The son of a clergyman living in London, Roget spent a good chunk of his childhood counting and listing things. For example, he counted the number of stairs that he climbed every day. By the time he was eight years old, he had already filled several notebooks with countless lists that covered topics like the parts of the body, things he had found in the garden, and all the animals he could think of.
Roget was distressed by a world that struck him as chaotic and messy. He was also surrounded by family members who would today be described as mentally ill. His mother suffered a psychotic breakdown after his father’s death, and his sister had a depressive illness. Worst of all, one of his uncles slashed his own throat in the middle of a conversation. It’s likely that Roget used his lists as a coping mechanism.
When Roget was 14, Edinburgh University invited him to come study medicine and the classics. He earned his medical degree there in 1798 when he was 19. Apparently unsure what to do with himself, he worked with various famous scientists like Erasmus Darwin and Jeremy Bentham. The latter devised a crude refrigerator called a “frigidarium,” and the persnickety Roget was appalled by “the filthiness of his equipment.”
When he was 25, Roget settled down and became a physician at the Manchester Royal Infirmary. He also devoted part of his time to introducing various public health reforms.
Roget retired from medicine in 1840, when he was 61 years old. He then read British Synonymy, a synonym dictionary compiled by Hester Lynch Piozzi. Roget was appalled, for he deemed the work haphazard. He also believed that no two words could be truly synonyms, as each word had different connotations and nuances. Piozzi had thus been working from a faulty premise.
Convinced he could do better, Roget dug up his old word lists and began categorizing words by class, division, and section, much as a natural historian sorted different species of animals by phylum, class, and order. He also included the gradation of meanings. In the section on “Cleanliness,” for instance, he included words describing pristine conditions and words describing utter filth.
When he was 73, Roget felt ready to publish his work. The publisher, however, noted that the book would be extremely difficult to navigate and thus persuaded Roget to add an index. In 1852, Roget’s book was published under the title Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, Classified and Arranged So As To Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition.
The thesaurus proved to be hit, and Roget spent the rest of his life correcting and adding to it in subsequent publications until he died at the age of 90. His heirs continued the job for another century. Roget’s name is now used as a generic name for any thesaurus.
