the.com/thesaurus
a book that helps you find a word, and then four hundred better ones.
means A reference book that groups words by meaning, listing synonyms and related terms so you can find a better or more precise word than the one you started with.
from Straight from the Latin thesaurus, meaning "treasure" or "treasure-house" — itself borrowed from the Greek thesauros, a store or storehouse for precious things. So a thesaurus is literally a hoard of words. The modern sense was cemented by Peter Mark Roget, who in the 19th century published his famous Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, turning the old word for a treasure-chest into the name for a vault of vocabulary.
- name origin
- Greek for treasure, treasury, or storehouse
- roget's debut
- physician published his in 1852, age 73
- thesaurus the lizard
- shares its name with no actual dinosaur
- hidden danger
- swapping synonyms can completely wreck a sentence
- not a dictionary
- gives kin and rivals, never definitions
roget's thesaurus — published 1852 by peter mark roget, the original organized reference of synonyms still in print
merriam-webster thesaurus — first edition 1942, now standard american reference with 250,000+ entries
oxford thesaurus — launched 1991, british reference with semantic groupings of related words