Introduction

“It is now nearly fifty years since I first projected a system of verbal classification similar to that on which the present work is founded.”

When I first happened to pick up an old copy of Roget’s Thesaurus at an antique store, with the words arranged in an elaborate hierarchy of meaning rather than alphabetically, the whole scheme struck me as a thing of subtle and arcane beauty. There’s something about a two hundred year old tree that makes it sort of portentous no matter what you hang on it.

“I had often during that long interval…contemplated its extension and improvement; but a sense of the magnitude of the task, amidst a multiple of other avocations, deterred me from the attempt.”

From the moment I first saw that outline with its one thousand headings, I believe I looked on it as the canvas to a painting that had already been very lightly sketched and that, if anyone would just bother to paint it, would be one of the greatest paintings ever completed. The only trouble is that the canvas is the size of a city block. Who among us is fit to paint on such a scale?

“Since my retirement…I resolved to embark in an undertaking which, for the last three or four years, has given me incessant occupation, and has, indeed, imposed upon me an amount of labour very much greater than I had anticipated.”

As I begin, the only design of which I’m aware is a desire to help men and women to Dream again – by which I mean, not to set high goals for themselves, but to welcome Strangeness itself. It might tickle one’s sense of paradox that I’m using such a dry and logical thing as an old, long outline as the vehicle for such a wet project, but I find no real inconsistency in it. Roget was the kind of person that would not have been a tinkerer if he had not also been a dreamer, a ranger on the strange fields of feelings that, being too definite for words, lie just outside of language.

“I am fully aware of its numerous deficiencies and imperfections, and of its falling far short of the degree of excellence that might be attained. But, in a Work of this nature, where perfection is placed at so great a distance, I have thought it best to limit my ambition to that moderate share of merit which it may claim in its present form; trusting to the indulgence of those for whose benefit it is intended, and to the candour of critics who, while they find it easy to detect faults, can at the same time appreciate the difficulties.”

P. M. Roget
April 29th, 1852