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A library of words: Discovering Roget's Thesaurus (2023)


Discovering Roget’s Thesaurus

This inclination was cemented as a habitual way of operating when I read John McPhee’s advice to skip the thesaurus and look up words you already know in the dictionary. On the shelf next to my dictionary, I noticed my red 2019 Penguin UK edition of Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, a book I purchased on a whim and never actually cracked. Peter Mark Roget(1779-1869) was a Victorian polymath: a doctor by trade, but he did all sorts of stuff: he was a consultant on pandemics, he wrote Encyclopedia Brittanica entries and a book about natural theology, he helped catalog several libraries, he invented the scale on the slide rule, and he may have written a paper that contributed to the birth of cinema.

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