A truck loaded with thousands of copies of thesauruses crashed yesterday. Witnesses were stunned, startled, aghast, taken aback, stupefied, confused, shocked, rattled, paralysed, dazed, bewildered, mixed up, surprised, awed, dumbfounded, nonplussed, flabbergasted, astounded, amazed, confounded, astonished, overwhelmed, horrified, numbed, speechless, and perplexed.
This joke has been doing the rounds of the Internet and whenever I see it, it makes me laugh. Don’t worry, I know it is a bit of a “Dad joke” but it is, nevertheless, quite clever.
Roget’s Thesaurus
We would all know of Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. First written by an English polymath, Peter Mark Roget. It was first printed in London in June 1852. It is one of the most recognisable books in the English language. Since then Roget’s has sold more than 40 million copies.
The compendious work systematically organises words into categories, making it easy for users to find words or phrases with similar of near similar meanings. Roget used the principles of Linnaeus biological classification, to divide up his words. Just as the 18th century naturalist Carl Linnaeus divided animals into six classes, Roget divided up his 1000 concepts into:
I Abstract Relations
II Space
III Matter
IV Intellect
V Volition
VI Affections
What is a thesaurus?
The word thesaurus (recorded in English in 1823) originally meant treasury or storehouse. It comes from the Latin thesaurus meaning treasury, hoard, or treasure and, in a figurative sense, a repository or collection.
Latin borrowed the word from Greek thēsauros also meaning a treasure, treasury, storehouse, or chest. It may well have come from an unknown language as it has no known relations before the Greeks.
In Middle English, thesaurer meant treasurer and thesaur meant treasure (used in the 15th–16th centuries). Elizabethan English even had the verb thesaurize meaning to hoard as treasure.
The figurative sense of an encyclopedia filled with information was in use by 1840, and the specific meaning of a collection of words arranged according to sense comes directly from Roget’s Thesaurus.
Importantly, in the 1590s a very similar word, thesaurarie, was being used by some English dictionary-makers from thesaurus verborum meaning a treasury of words.
The final word
And what more can I say. To have a wealth of words makes us rich indeed.