Thesaurus

This is a collection of related words. They are of two types, the Roget-type and the A-Z type thesaurus.

From history, the word 'thesaurus' is derived from a Greek word 'thesauros' that means a large collections of valuables, like a treasury. a thesaurus is an English grammar work that puts together words according to their similarity in meaning and arrangement. This work of grammar was first done by Philo of Byblos of the 4th century. He first that relates to current versions of the thesaurus was done by Peter Mark Roget in the year 1852. The form of arrangement was by relation rather than alphabetical order.

The thesaurus is meant to give exactly related words only and unlike a dictionary which gives meaning, the thesaurus does not. Using a thesaurus helps eliminate repetition in English works, as it can generates more words that can be used instead of that same word. to use a thesaurus, one has to know which type he or she is using as there are basically two types of thesauruses; the Roget-type thesaurus and the A-Z thesaurus. Limitations of words search should be avoided as one can miss the actual word being looked for, so look for words before and after the word search results.

In current IT worlds, a thesaurus is used to index related reference material to ease the process of finding them in libraries. This basically means, in say an online or real world library some tags will be used to designate a certain type of reference material hence biology books will not be grouped with chemistry books. to further ease the finding of these related words, websites have been made which have search engines that simply require typing of the keywords and the results will be inform of required words.