Thursday, January 21, 2010

Joshua Kendall Roget's Thesaurus (2008)

I love my thesaurus, but after reading this book, decided I needed to update mine (third edition) and then thought ah ha, perfect Kindle book, expecting it to be free (see below).
Background from my 2008 reading list:: Joshua Kendall published a biography of Roget called The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus (2008)
Peter Mark Roget worked on a project classifying words for almost 50 years, amassing over 15,000 words, finally publishing his manuscript as Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged So as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition (1852). Roget, born in London Jan 18th, 1779, had a long and distinguished career as a doctor; he lectured, he invented a slide rule that did complex mathematics, he studied optics and made an important breakthrough about how the retina perceives images. When he retired, he returned to the thesaurus, a compilation of words arranged in categories. Roget's Thesaurus has never been out of print, is now in it's 6th Edition (2002) and contains more than 330,000 words in 1075 categories. It was part of the Gutenburg project, and is available for free as a download. On Kindle and Nook, however, you will pay $10, if you don't know about pdf files.

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