The Original Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases [antikvár]

PREFACE to the Revised Edition 1962 To most people who know it, Roget's Thesaurus suggests a collection of synonyms on a grand scale with an index, very useful if you are looking for an alternative expression or are simply at a loss for a word to fit a thought. That the popular idea largely represents Roget's practical aim is clear from his Introduction to the first edition of 1852 (reproduced here on pp. xxvii-xliii); and that this aim was not ill-directed is shown by the scores of reprints, new editions (some unauthorized), imitations and adaptations demanded by generations of users, a demand still continuing after more than a hundred years. Roget laid his foundations well. This new edition, issued by the same publishers as ushered the first into the world, is indeed somewhat altered in appearance, with a text entirely rewritten and greatly expanded, and an index wholly recompiled, but organically identical with Roget's original. It observes the same principles and stands in the true line of descent from the successive editions brought by Peter Mark Roget himself, and by his son and grandson. For there was nothing haphazard in Roget's design. He set out to make "a collection of words . . . arranged not in alphabetical order, as they are in a Dictionary, but according to the ideas which they express." Words express ideas—the ideas we have of tangible objects as well as of abstractions. Words expressing related ideas may be grouped under general heads; these general heads may be sorted into a system, so that we have a comprehensive classification into which, theoretically, any word in the language may be fitted and related to a context. Such an arrangement imposes the collocation of synonymous expressions in categories and thus attains Roget's object: "The idea being given, to find the word or words by which that idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed." This is the opposite of a dictionary's function, which is: "The word being given, to find its signification or the idea it is intended to convey." The two functions should not be confused. A thesaurus (in the sense it acquired after Roget used it in the title of his work) does not seek, like a dictionary, to define a word in all its meanings and in one place. Its business is with contexts, not with definitions. It discourses rather than analyzes. It starts with a meaning, not with a word, and sets the [vii]