#peter roget

[gregorygalloway]

Peter Mark Roget’s Thesaurus was first published on 29 April 1852.

Roget had begun work on the thesaurus in 1805 and the original edition contained 15,000 words. By the time Roget died in 1869 (at the age of 90), the thesaurus had been revised and reprinted 28 times. His son and grandson oversaw the expansions and reprintings until 1952.

[historysisco]

On This Day in History April 29, 1852: The 1st edition of Peter Roget's Thesaurus is published by London publishers Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans. 

Now I would assume that we’ve all been in the position where that we’ve had the need to use a Thesaurus. But some of you might wonder: What exactly is a Thesaurus? According to the post Roget's Thesaurus from the Merriam-Webster website:

We tend to think of a thesaurus as a collection of synonyms and antonyms. But Roget’s is essentially a reverse dictionary. With a dictionary, the user looks up a word to find its meaning. With Roget’s, the user start with an idea and then keeps flipping through the book until he finds the word that best expresses it. 

For Further Reading:

Roget's Thesaurus is First Published 50 Years After its Composition 4/29/1852 from Jeremy Norman’s History of Information website

[felixkeepswalking]

Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869), of thesaurus fame, published Explanation of an optical deception in the appearance of the spokes of a wheel when seen through vertical apertures in 1824, an examination of the illusion of motion in a spinning wheel.  This article helped inspire the subsequent development of the zeotrope (also called a daedalum) and the phenakistoscope, pre-film animation devices.

[seawomanbds]

Origins of Thesaurus Day (January 18th)

Origins of Thesaurus Day 

by Sandra Sealy

Peter Mark Roget (Jan 18th 1779- Sep 12th 1869)

#ThesaurusDay is Jan 18th, celebrating the birthday of Roget’s Thesaurus author, Peter Mark Roget born on 1779 in London, the son of Rev. John Roget, a Swiss clergyman. He began to study medicine from the age of 14 at Edinburgh University and was also , famous for his investigation of gases of possible…

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[eerdblurbs]

Preliminary art for The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus by Melissa Sweet (illustrator) and Jen Bryant (author)

[clenisewood]

Happy Thesaurus Day! Don't consign to oblivion on this diurnal course for the use of our cherished onomasticon!  Jovial 243 dates of birth, Peter Roget!

[straymessages]

With his experimental subjects, Davy monitored pulse rates, and required them to undergo certain standard tests, such as gazing at a candle flame and listening to bells. He wanted to record physiological changes, such as distortions of vision and hearing. But gradually he became more and more interested in subjective responses. He asked his Institution patients to put into words exactly what they were feeling. This proved surprisingly difficult, and early responses ranged from 'I don't know how, but very queer'; to 'I felt like the sound of a harp.' Davy now conceived a new and original line of investigation. He began to enlist perfectly healthy subjects, chosen from his highly articulate circle of Bristol friends, and asked them to describe their sensation as precisely as possible. They included the poet Robert Southey, several members of the Edgeworth family, Gregory Watt and his father James, Tom Wedgwood, the heir to the great Saffordshire pottery company, and a number of young writers and scholars like Peter Roget and John Rickman. A few, like Cottle, refused to volunteer, either on moral or prudential grounds. But it is striking how many accepted. Eighty pages of these accounts were eventually published in Davy's Researches. Many of their strange, gasped phrases included the idea of rebirth: 'I seemed a new being'; 'I seemed a sublime being newly created'; 'I felt as if possessed of new organs.' Initial enthusiasm were naive and unbounded. Gregory Watt spoke of 'heavenly inhalations.' Robert Southey wrote to his brother: 'O, Tom! Such a gas has Davy discovered, the gaseous oxide. Oh, Tom! I have had some; it made me laugh and tingle in every toe and finger-tip, Davy has actually invented a new pleasure, for which language has no name. Oh, Tom! I am going for more this evening! IT makes one strong and happy! So gloriously happy!' --- Dr. Peter Mark Roget, then a young medical student from Edinburgh, and the future compile of Roget's Thesaurus (1852), found, ironically enough, great difficulty in choosing the words to describe his feelings aptly. 'I felt myself totally incapable of speaking... My ideas succeeded on another with extreme rapidity, thoughts rushed like a torrent through my mind.' He felt forced to try analogies, and towards the end managed an accurate description of fainting: 'I suddenly lost sight of all the objects round me, they being apparently obscured by clouds, in which were many luminous points, similar to what is experienced on rising suddenly and stretching out the arms.' Mr. Coates primly observed 'a degree hilarity altogether new to me'; while Miss Ryland was circumspectly 'deprived of the power of speaking, but not recollection'. Beddoes's brother in law, the jovial Mr. Lovell Edgeworth, 'burst into a violent fit of laughter, and capered about the room without having the power of restraining myself'. He remarked wonderingly that he almost bit through the wooden mouthpiece. What Davy began to see was that reactions reflected personal temperament, as much as simple physiological changes. So what the musician Mr. Wansey reported was an experience like 'some of the grand choruses of the Messiah' which he had heard played by 700 instruments in Westminster Abbey five years previously. While Southey's great friend, the down-to-earth radical tanner of Nether Stowey, Tom Poole, was reminded of climbing mountains in Glamoganshire.

on a series of experiments with inhaling nitrous oxide (N2O) or laughing gas,

from The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes