A library of words: Discovering Roget's Thesaurus (2023) | Hacker News Reader

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

austinkleon.substack.com

48 pointsNaOH13 comments

The author notes:

> since around 1962, publishers have abandoned the side-by-side layout of opposing categories which Roget insisted on as a visual representation of the opposing ideas

illustrated by the original's side-by-side entries for 615 Good and 616 Evil, seeing this as an unfortunate

> example of one of the many ways book design is actually getting less sophisticated over time.

It appears the Gutenberg project also see value in preserving the two columns, at least in their html edition, as can be seen in their rendition of the same passages: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10681/pg10681-images.ht.... (Link is to a 10M html file).

(Though it seems things have moved on, since Evil is now #619.)

Surely there must be more programmatic electronic editions, though, given the highly tractable organisation of the book?

I believe the "Wordweb" program had something along those lines --- at least I seem to remember it being easy to click through a word, through synonyms, and also review antonyms:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordWeb

I once had a python side project, it parses the 1911 edition of Roget Thesaurus into memory and provides some queries.

https://github.com/MoserMichael/roget-thesaurus-parser

Where does the stereotype 'thesaurus = synonyms + antonyms' come from?

I'm not a native english speaker, and I never heard that idea besides in, I'd guess, Friends TV show.

I've used thesauruses since my childhood for exactly the task of looking up meanings, explanations, perhaps some etymology baked in.

For English, I always use WordNet, it is quite good and works offline on Android.

For my basic level of Chinese, Outliers dictionaries are so far the best I have found, but that's mainly due to my heavy reliance on the etymology provided there.

Well, I guess I got carried away a bit. Back to my question, where thesaurus=synonyms+antonyms comes from?

From the writer's need to find a more suitable word than the ones he knows.

The usage of "thesaurus" in English for a kind of book dates back to the first one by Peter Mark Roget in 1852, which was indeed synonyms and antonyms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roget%27s_Thesaurus see the Project Gutenberg link mentioned in another comment: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10681/pg10681-images.ht... (or indeed, just read the posted article here).

This is still the primary meaning of "thesaurus" in English, and contrasted with "dictionary": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thesaurus

It's very unusual for a thesaurus to contain meanings (beyond the category head/name) and etymology, let alone explanation. Such things are usually found in a dictionary instead.

So it's more a question for you: where did your unusual idea of "thesaurus" come from? As one of your examples you mention dictionaries, so that's especially confusing.

I'd assume from the earlier meaning of "thesaurus" which comes from "treasury," or as it exists in my mind, treasure chest.

> The meaning "encyclopedia filled with information" is from 1840, but it existed earlier as thesaurarie (1590s), used as a title by some early dictionary compilers, on the notion of thesaurus verborum "a treasury of words." The meaning "collection of words arranged according to sense" is attested from 1852 in Roget's title.

from: https://www.etymonline.com/word/thesaurus

The word comes from Greek, θησαυρός - "a store, treasure, storehouse, treasury".

> The usage of "thesaurus" in English for a kind of book dates back to the first one by Peter Mark Roget in 1852

To nitpick, though of interest: The usage meaning a book of words organized by their senses indeed dates to Roget's use in 1852, as the parent comment says. An earlier usage is more generally a 'treasury' of knowledge (in book form): there was a Thesaurus Linguæ Romanæ et Britannicæ ... in 1565, a Thesaurus Linguæ Latinæ compendiarius ... in 1736, and John Stuart Mill in 1840 wrote about "A thesaurus of commonplaces for the discussion of questions."

Source: Oxford English Dictionary

I did in fact look at Etymonline for "thesaurus" before I made my comment and therefore chose my words carefully, but not clearly enough. Yes there were books before Roget's that contained the word “thesaurus” (treasury) in their title, including at least one dictionary. But none of these earlier books caused the word “thesaurus” to start to mean a particular kind of book, which it does in English following Roget — and that kind of book is precisely one that contains synonyms and antonyms, and usually does not contain meanings or etymology. So the comment by folex remains weird — for one thing, it uses “stereotype” where “meaning” would be more appropriate.

> Yes there were books before Roget's that contained the word “thesaurus” (treasury) in their title, including at least one dictionary. But none of these earlier books caused the word “thesaurus” to start to mean a particular kind of book ...

FWIW, OED has a separate sense for, "A ‘treasury’ or ‘storehouse’ of knowledge, as a dictionary, encyclopædia, or the like." Is that a particular kind of book or a general concept? I don't know.

Its usage extends past Roget - e.g., (1862) "In a complete thesaurus of any language, the etymology of every word should exhibit both its philology and its linguistics." and (1906) "This work is one of five thesauri published under the auspices of Kang Hsi, the second Emperor of the present dynasty."

And to be complete, a newer usage dates to 1957, "A classified list of terms, esp. key-words, in a particular field, for use in indexing and information retrieval.".

> I did in fact look at Etymonline

Etymonline is the admiral work of one person. If you can get access to the OED (and if you love etymology, etc., it's essential), you'll generally find much more, and much more reliable work done by teams of professional over ~150 years.

Etymonline's About page is incredible - I'm going to submit it:

https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/bio

> the comment by folex remains weird — for one thing, it uses “stereotype” where “meaning” would be more appropriate.

Not weird at all - folex says they don't speak English natively. Stereotype makes sense in a way, but is not the word a native speaker would choose. I'm the same in some languages.

folex's question is maybe the most interesting part of the discussion.

I'm not sure stereotype is the correct word here. But even setting that aside, a thesaurus being a referential work containing words grouped by similarity is the CONVENTIONAL definition.

Everyone of my friends and family had one growing up. It wasn't completely uncommon as a young child to glaze your eyes "beautiful mind style" to suss out repetitious or excessive duplicate word usage in your hastily prepared 5-paragraph MLA format essay and then run it through the nearest Merriam-Webster thesaurus.

https://youtu.be/XAD13c3UkS0?t=49

the cambridge dictionary thesaurus has a similar organisation and i always thought it was a unique quirk (further promulgated by the mobile version calling it "smart thesaurus").

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/thesaurus/articles/differen...

Interesting. So, a kind of precursor to LLMs, or if you like, a pre-electronic, pen-and-paper latent space.

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