Peter Mark Roget, an English physician and lecturer, published his famous thesaurus in 1852.

He designed it “to facilitate the expression of ideas and to assist in literary composition”.

Considered the leading authority in thesauruses, Roget’s Thesaurus has not been out of print since its original publication.

Roget began working on it in 1805, and retired from medicine and lecturing in 1840 to work on it full time.

The book became known as Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. Roget died, aged 90, in 1869.

Although the best known, his was not the first attempt. Opinions differ as to who penned the first example of a thesaurus.

The earliest was Philo of Byblos, an antiquarian writer of grammar, lexicon and history works in Greek, living in about 100 AD.

However the Amera Cosha, or Amerakosha, dating from anywhere between the 6th and 10th century, which took the vocabulary of Sanskrit as its subject matter, was more like a modern thesaurus.

Bishop John Wilkins created a thesaurus in the 17th century, to tackle philosophical language, but Roget later deemed it too complicated and artificial.

The word “thesaurus” is derived from Latin and Ancient Greek, meaning a collection of things that are of big importance or value, and the medieval rank of thesaurer was a synonym for treasurer.

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