In my latest newsletter, I wrote about becoming obsessed with Rogetโs Thesaurus, after realizing that every thesaurus Iโd ever picked up was alphabetical,ย and alphabetizing a thesaurus basically destroys the meaning behind what Roget was trying to do.
โWe tend to think of a thesaurus as a collection of synonyms and antonyms,โ writes Rogetโs biographer, Joshua Kendell. โBut Rogetโs is essentially a reverse dictionary. With a dictionary, the user looks up a word to find its meaning. With Rogetโs, the user starts with an idea and then keeps flipping through the book until he finds the word that best expresses it.โ
Read it here.