Digging into the treasure of Roget’s Thesaurus
The podcast episode I released today was entitled “In Praise of Roget’s.” In it, I. talk for a short while about some of my favorite aspects of the many thesauri that bear the name “Roget’s.” I thought I would dig a little deeper into that topic on my blog, sharing a few thoughts on how a thesaurus like Roget’s works. I’ll be looking at a few different editions of Roget’s Thesaurus (several of which I mention in the podcast), and what they have in common, as well as what sets them apart from one another.
First of all, even though there are several different volumes that have been published with the name “Roget” in their titles, I will not be discussing the modern dictionary-type kind of thesaurus made popular in recent decades, e.g. Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus or Roget’s 21st Century in Dictionary Form. Whereas these volumes may very well be handy tools, they depart from the classification system that made Roget’s work so amazingly useful. You see, Roget’s Thesaurus was not merely a book of synonyms and antonyms. No, his book was a way of classifying the entire universe into concepts described by language. Roget’s system of classification was said to have been based on the philosophical work of Gottfried Leibnitz. Roget divided all of the concepts in his Thesaurus into six overall classes:
An expanded version of Roget’s original classifications can be found at this Wiktionary article, and an even more detailed breakdown can be found here at the Wayback Machine. Each of the large classes listed above are then divided into more and more specific classes. Roget, a great lover of symmetry, originally came up with a total of 1,002 subclasses, but managed to whittle those down to 1,000, in order to have a more pleasing number. As subsequent editions of Roget’s work were released, the overall classes, as well as the subclasses beneath them, were gradually revised.
By the Third Edition of Roget’s International Thesaurus (1962), for example, the overall classes have evolved into eight categories:
These slightly different major classes increased Roget’s original 1,000 subclasses to a total of 1,040 subclasses. Notice how the class “Matter” has been broken into two classes: “Physics” and “Matter.” And the class “Intellect” has been broken into two classes as well: “Sensation” and “Intellect.” The amazing thing about this whole system, though, is that the curious reader need not limit himself to merely looking up a word and finding its synonyms. Rather, one may start with an overall category, such as “Intellect,” and take a wonderful trip down a rabbit hole! Looking at the 3rd ed. some more, if I begin with “Intellect,” that may lead me to “States of Mind,” which could lead to “Mental Attitudes,” which could then lead to “526. Curiosity.” It’s only at that point that the lists of synonyms occur!
I’m going to skip ahead in time to the Seventh Edition of Roget’s International Theaurus, edited by Barbara Ann Kipfer, Ph.D. (2010) By this time in history, editors had completely rethought Roget’s system of classification, and so we see 15 radically different major classes, divided into a total of 1,075 subclasses. It had been 110 years from the first edition of Peter Mark Roget (1852) to the previously mentioned Third Edition (1962). Just think of all of the technological developments from 1962 to 2010: the internet, computers, space travel, and a host of other technological developments! In the interest of not making this blog post ridiculously long, I shall only provide the 15 major classes of Kipfer’s work:
Place and Change of Place
Human Society and Institutions
You can easily see how much more specific these major classes are, compared to Roget’s vastly more overarching themes. Incidentally, it is worth noting that classes 7 and 14, “Behavior and the Will” and “The Mind and Ideas” are absolutely huge sections, much longer than most of the other classes! Meanwhile, it’s not just a different organizing principle from Roget’s system; it’s an entirely different way of observing the world around us.
I’d like to look at one other modern version of Roget’s Thesaurus, called Bartlett’s Roget’s Thesaurus (1996). I find this one interesting, partly because it mixes in a lot of famous quotations (relating it to another reference ork that has been around almost as long as Roget’s: Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. But it also has yet another system of classifications that is quite different from the ones we’ve seen previously. For one thing, the editors of this work don’t number their overall categories, and there are more of them, 24 in total. This leaves us with only 848 subclasses; I suppose, as the system of overall classification gets more specific, the editors didn’t see the need to divide those major categories into so many smaller subcategories. Looking at the list of 24 major classes, you will see some familiar themes to the 7th ed. listed above, with many different ones mixed in (I’ve numbered them for convenience, and to make sure I didn’t skip any):
Negotiations and Fiscal Relations
Just for fun, I’m going to take the example I used earlier, that led me to the topic of “Curiosity,” but I’m going to start at the other end. In Bartlett’s Roget’s, “321. Curiosity” is a subset of “The Intellect and Ideas.” A bit different nuance than the earlier example, where it was a subset of “Mental Attitudes,” which was a few steps down from the larger category of “Intellect.”
One more thing that all of these editions I’ve discussed have in common, that I think makes them immensely useful as a resource, is that the individually numbered categories, just before the various lists of synonyms are usually grouped in pairs of opposing concepts. For example, in the Bartlett’s Roget’s, “767. Arrangement” is followed by “768. Disturbance.” Or in the 7th International, “632. Expensiveness” is followed by “633. Cheapness.” I find this far more interesting than simply looking up the word “cheap,” and then merely seeing a list of synonyms and antonyms. The arrangement of the categories goes beyond simple pairings. There’s a sort of progressive development to a lot of the categories: for example, in the 3rd International, one can move from “582. Sociability” to “583. Unsociability” to “584. Seclusion” to “585. Hospitality,Welcome” to “586. Inhospitality.” It doesn’t stop there, and some of the progressions make more sense than others.
Perhaps you can see why I love digging through a thesaurus of this type. There’s a reason Roget used the word thesaurus, a Latin word that was adapted from the Greek word θησαυρός (”treasure”). If you find a copy of one of these thesauri I’ve mentioned above, and begin digging through it, you may find it to be a treasure trove of words and concepts. Happy digging!