Peter Mark Roget looked to the Greek language to name his invention. The word he chose reflects his love for the collection of words. “Thesaurus” comes from the Greek θησαυρός (thēsauros) meaning ‘treasure, treasury, storehouse’. [1]
Roget’s Thesaurus was first published on 29 April 1852, after almost 50 years of work. It became an immediate success and has been in continuous print since then.
In his spare time in 1805, 26-year-old Peter Mark Roget, a young British physician began working on a project to organize and expand his vocabulary by classifying words according to their meaning. Roget’s goal was to create a tool that would help him express himself more clearly and accurately in his writing and public speaking.
It was not until his retirement from medicine and the Royal Society in 1849, that 69-year-old Roget returned to his classification work, and spending the next three years compiling his catalogue ready for publication. The Thesaurus reached 15,000 words organized conceptually rather than alphabetically. It was first printed in 1852 with 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 first print run was 1,000 books, and it has never been out of print since then.
Roget went on to carry out regular revisions of the book until his death in 1869, aged 91. During his lifetime, the work had twenty-eight printings. His son and grandson continued editing the thesaurus until the 1950s when it was sold the publishers Longman’s.