THESAURUS — A NEW WORD IN DOCUMENTATION

‘Thesaurus’ comes from the Greek—a storehouse or treasury. The Shorter Oxford English dictionary gives 1736 for the English usage ‘a treasury or storehouse of knowledge, as a dictionary, encyclopaedia or the like’. In 1852, Peter Mark Roget published his Thesaurus of English words and phrases: ‘a collection … arranged, not in alphabetical order as they are in a dictionary, but according to the ideas which they express… The object aimed at is, the idea being given, to find the word, or words, by which that idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed.’ All who write English have heard of this thesaurus.