rogets thesaurus

and his excellent unparalleled crackajack gilt-edged tip-top thesaurus

Rogets Thesaurus may be known primarily as the book you go to search for a good word. But for Julie Blake it is much more than that: a mirror of changing attitudes to language, a remarkable work of descriptive linguistics and a highly democratic offer to make writers of us all.

f I were banished to live a lonely life of exile on a desert island, and I could have only one book, it would, without any doubt or hesitation, be Rogets Thesaurus. It has not been out of print since it was published in 1852, it has sold over 32 million copies and it is claimed that it is almost as widely distributed as the Bible. Long seen as a marker of educational and literary aspiration, you may already have a giftwrapped copy from a well-meaning aunty. And if it hasnt yet crossed your path, its only a matter of time before it does.

Not a dictionary
Rogets Thesaurus is a big book of words, thesaurus coined from the 16th-century Latin for a treasury or storehouse of knowledge. Distinctly different from a dictionary, the words are not listed alphabetically and no meanings are given. A thesaurus is, if you like, the opposite of a dictionary. You might use a dictionary when you know the form of a word but want to know more about its meaning. In contrast, you might use a thesaurus when you know the meaning you are trying to express but want a reminder of the different word forms you might use to do so.

Chains of thought
Roget expected a lot of his readers and he knew it, writing in the introduction to the rst edition that his task was:

not to explain the signication of words, but simply classify and arrange them according to the sense in which they are now used, and which I presume to be already known to the reader.
Simply classify is not the reaction most new users of the thesaurus have, as its organisation is very unfamiliar. Instead of the straightforward A-Z headwords and denitions of a dictionary you are confronted by a complex philosophical classication of the whole language into six classes of thought: abstract relations, space, matter, intellect, volition, and
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From left to right, the Penguin 1984 edition, the 1993 dictionary form and the 150th anniversary edition of 2002.

emotion, religion and morality. Each class of thought is further subdivided. For example, in class 1, abstract relations, section 6 is time. In each section there are numbered headwords with a list of synonyms, as you can see in the entry for young person shown on page 7, from the 1984 Penguin edition. It takes some getting used to, and the alphabetical index at the back is indispensable. Within each entry the listing of synonyms is not random; each one is organised into chains of semantically related words, separated by semi-colons. In this example, one chain is babe, baby, bundle of joy, affectionate words for a very young infant of either sex; another chain is urchin, nipper, cub, young shaver, whippersnapper, also quite affectionate, but referring to teenage boys. But what about young shaver have you ever heard that in your life? And look at the synonym chain Ted, mod, rocker, punk, skinhead. What do you make of that in a book published in 1852? Both seem oddly anachronistic, and you can only really make sense of them by understanding a little of the publishing history of Rogets Thesaurus.

Although Rogets name appears on the cover of all these books, the original text, with just 1000 headwords has been revised many times by many different editors. Like Mrs Beetons Book of Household Management, Rogets Thesaurus has been more shaped by subsequent writers and editors than by its original author. In the case of Rogets Thesaurus this has usually been in response to language variation and change. Susan M. Lloyd, editor of the 1984 Penguin edition, explains in her preface that the revisions of 1982 aimed to mirror the language and attitudes of our present society. She made changes in response to 1980s ideas about language and gender; similarly, in October 1930, a Sunday Express writer reported as news the fact that pejorative synonyms for the word Jew had been omitted in a recent American edition. We might well want to revise the Ted, mod, rocker, punk, skinhead chain, moving them, perhaps, into the entry for old person and replacing them with more contemporary terms for a young fan of a particular type of music. Roget himself made changes: between initial publication, when he was 73-years-old, and his death 17 years later, aged 90, he was personally involved in revising and amending 25 different editions and printings.

his attitude to language is broadly without prescription or prejudice. He wrote in his introduction:

My object, be it remembered, is not to regulate the use of words, but simply to supply and to suggest such as may be wanted on occasion, leaving the proper selection entirely to the discretion and taste of the employer.
This was to be a descriptive reference work, a work of scientic classication, not one of manners or morals.

Too democratic?
That sense of simple usefulness earned it many favourable reviews on publication, and is perhaps the main reason it is a perennial bestseller. However, it is in the nature of traditional British culture to treat aspiration as a vulgar habit, and in that context it comes as no surprise that Rogets Thesaurus has not been without its detractors, then or now. In July 1854 an American writer, E.P. Whipple, wrote an excoriating and personally insulting review, ridiculing the utility of Rogets Thesaurus. He argues at length that genuine expression will never happen while:

The publishing history

The Rogets Thesaurus you could buy new today, the 150th anniversary edition of 2002, will not be the same as the one sitting here on my desk. It wont be the same as the rst edition of 1852, or the signicantly revised editions of 1879, 1925, 1933, 1936, 1952, 1962 and 1982. It wont be the same as the rst American edition which omitted what the American editor called vulgar words and phrases or later American editions amended in line with the development of American English, or the rst International Edition of 1922, or the pocket versions, or the editions that wipe out the numbered headwords in favour of the A-Z form of a conventional dictionary.
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A supplier of words
I said at the start that Rogets Thesaurus has long been regarded as a marker of aspiration. Roget wrote in his preface that the small scale classed catalogue of words which formed the basis of his book was of much use to him in his literary composition, helping him to overcome his stylistic deciencies by prompting consideration of a variety of ways in which an idea might be expressed. He hoped his book would prove useful to others. (At this time literary composition would have been understood as a general reference to formal writings; the word literary has since narrowed.) His goal is utilitarian and

Dr Peter Mark Roget, who never happened on a verbal felicity or uttered a thought-executing word in the course of his long and useful life, rushes about, book in hand, to tempt unthinking and unimpassioned mediocrity into delusion, that its disconnected glimpses of truths never fairly grasped, and its faint movements of embryo aspirations which never broke their shell, can be worded by his specics into creative thought and passion.
This view, that Rogets Thesaurus encourages the boorish masses to think they can become accomplished writers, is a barely disguised expression of class prejudice. This opinion has not gone away. Few educated people will admit to having a copy of Rogets Thesaurus, still fewer to using it for anything other than the trickier solutions to The Times crossword. This attitude thrives on a mixture of deeply-rooted social

snobbery and the fact that a simplistic understanding of synonymy a belief that all synonyms are interchangeable can cause inexperienced writers to reach for a more elevated word and use it without consideration of context or connotations. It is hardly enough to warrant the smell of the gutter with which such nave errors are sniffed at.

Did you know?

He enrolled to study medicine at Edinburgh University aged 14 years and graduated aged 19 years; graduation was something achieved by only about 4% of medical students. Roget is thought to have met Samuel Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Robert Southey while helping Humphrey Davy with some experiments into the uses of nitrous oxide or laughing gas at the Thomas Beddoes Pneumatic Institute in Bristol. He spent time working for Jeremy Bentham on early ideas for the development of a frigidarium, what we now know as the fridge. While on a tour of Europe as tutor to two boys, Napoleon reneged on a peace treaty with the UK. Threatened with imprisonment for being English, Roget dressed himself and the boys as peasants and did a moonlight it through Europe back home. He helped set up the School of Medicine at the University of Manchester, holding many series of public lectures on anatomy and physiology throughout his life. He invented the log-log slide rule, a gadget for calculating the roots and powers of numbers, a version of which was used in schools until the pocket calculator took over. As a practising doctor, he was involved over a 15-month period in trying to control an epidemic of scurvy and dysentery at the state-of-the-art penitentiary on Millbank in London. His practical attempts to understand disease control saved the lives of many people before the germ theory of disease was discovered. He attempted to construct a calculating machine although this work was overshadowed by that of his rival Charles Babbage, now known as the originator of the idea of the programmable computer. With cholera sweeping the UK, he was commissioned to carry out a scientic investigation into the (appalling) standard of the water supply in London. After a hard battle with intransigent authority, his report eventually led to sanitation reforms. He contributed scientic articles on ants, bees, cranioscopy and phrenology, amongst others, to the early editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He published articles about laughing gas, arsenic, kaleidoscopes, magnetism, chess, and the optical phenomenon that led others to the development of the zoetrope, and eventually, moving lm.

Splendid and scientific

I use Rogets Thesaurus without any sense of social embarrassment, and, as an incorrigible word-hoarder, I love every entry in every edition. I could wile away my desert island years enjoying the splendid variety of the English language. But what might help me through my adversity is the conviction inherent in the structure of the book that everything in nature is part of a coherent order, an order that can be found through the rational enquiry of a big brain and a patient disposition. In this, Roget was a man of his times, the big projects in advancing scientic understanding being all about classication. He was also a man for his times, his great gift lying not in linguistics or literary composition (nor in the scientic or medical elds most of his lifes work was engaged with) but in the ability to organise knowledge and make it accessible to ordinary people at a time when literacy and education were opening the doors. And he was a man ahead of his time, adopting a descriptive approach to linguistic knowledge at a time when manners and morals were more prominent, and recognising the signicance of synonymy to an understanding of language. Rogets Thesaurus deserves a place on everyones desk.

Julie Blake is the author of The Full English, codeveloper of Teachit Language, and lecturer in English and Education at the University of Plymouth.

An excerpt from the manuscript of Rogets Thesaurus Images courtesy of The Karpeles Manuscript Library

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