Peter Mark Roget
 1779 - 1869

It is just a hundred years since Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases was first published. In the course of that century of unprecedented development and change our language and vocabulary have undergone modifications and additions which have been dealt with from time to time in previous revisions of the work. But a new generation has grown up since the last recension, and the time seemed ripe for a more complete overhaul which would make it thoroughly up to date. Accordingly, the opportunity has been taken, in preparing this new single-volume edition, of giving the work as complete a revision as was possible, short of doing the whole compilation afresh. Every paragraph has been carefully reviewed, over 10,000 words and phrases have been added, and the articles have been ' tidied up' so that all additions follow the logical order which agrees with the original plan.

In the course of its century of use Roget's Thesaurus has come to be as widely accepted and as indispensable to writers as a dictionary, and its system and arrangement have become so familiar that any radical alteration of them would lessen the value of the book to those who know their way about it from constant use. For that reason no attempt has been made to modify the main scheme which Roget originally laid down, and except for a few very minor alterations of numbering where the order had become confused the arrangement is the same as in previous editions. Within this scheme the articles have been greatly amplified and expanded, some of the pages containing up to a hundred fresh insertions.

The list of contents at the beginning sets out the plan of classification, and indicates the general divisions of the book. Readers who are interested in the detailed subdivisions of the classification will find them in the different paragraph headings, and the general principles of the work are explained in Roget's original Introduction, now printed at the end of the volume.

Technical Terms.

In giving some account of the additions which have been made, it is natural to start off with those technical terms which have been coined to fit modern scientific, political, and cultural developments. The wide range of the subjects covered is shown by these typical examples taken at random: air-condition, airgraph, allergy, antibiotic, Appleton layer, bathysphere, Dadaism, deviationist, diarchy, displaced person, electrolysis, existentialism, fifth column, Gallup poll, geriatrics, Heaviside layer, hydro­ponics, intercom, ionosphere, iron curtain, libido, liquidate, parapsycho­logy, psychotherapist, quisling, radar, robot, rotor, stratosphere, surrealism, telekinesis, television, troposphere, weather station.

Along with the previous section may be grouped the very numerous terms which deal with recent developments in aviation and aerial warfare. These represent new types of aircraft: autogiro, flying fortress, flying wing, jet aircraft, stratocruiser, stratoliner; new types of weapon: atom bomb, buzz-bomb, doodlebug, flying bomb, guided missile, Vi, V2', new names for personnel: group-captain, wing-commander, squadron-leader, flight-lieutenant', and for their evolutions: air lift, bunt. Finally there are words for the yet untried adventure of interplanetary voyaging: astronautics, spacecraft, space ship, space travel.

In addition to words marking scientific advance there are also, of course, many neologisms reflecting change or fashion in everyday affairs, such as baby-sitter, bingle, blurb, bottle-neck, bottle party, bull­dozer, cannibalize, cartophily, embus, exclosure, frogman, green belt, in­frastructure, jive, lumberjacket, nylons, phillumenist, play-pen, plug (repeat), prefab, pullover, quiz, screen (test), stockpile, totalizator, zipper.

New slang terms form a considerable proportion of our additions, and among them will be noted a large number of service, particularly Air Force Coinages; the newest arm seems to have eclipsed the Navy in fertility of etymological invention. A few of the more recent terms are: blah, browned off, bunce, chokka, dippy, erk, flap (fuss), flat out, flicks (cinema), gen, good show, hush-hush, It, Joe Soap, loopy, mike (microphone), never-never system, oodles, popsy, scarper, scatty, shemozzle, smashing, sprog, toffee-nose, twerp, whodunit, and such phrases as get cracking, get weaving, gone for a Burton, in a spin, it's in the hag, a piece of cake, shoot down in flames, step on it, tear off a strip, couldn't care less.

So many of our slang and other new words are borrowed from across S the Atlantic that they demand a separate paragraph. A number of the commoner Americanisms had already been incorporated in the work, but fresh additions include attaboy, bobbysoxer, boloney, bonehead, bughouse, burp, calaboose, chipper, come-back, cutie, didoes, doll up, faze, floosy, 'fraid-cat, G-man, gander (look), goo, grip-sack, haywire, hick, high-hat, hoodlum, hooey, hophead, jeep, jinx, josh, juke box, mazuma, mortician, motel, oomph, once-over, pan (face), pep, pinch-hitter, punk, rube, scram, screwball, simoleons, simp, smog, snoop, soup-and-fish, spondulics, stand-in, stooge, stuffed shirt, teenager, tuxedo, upstage, wise­crack, wop, yegg, along with phrases like cut no ice, hit the hay, out of kilter, stick one's neck out, take a run-out powder, give the frozen mitt.

The opportunity has also been taken to insert a few of the terms in most common use north of the Tweed or wherever there are colonies of  Scots. Only the most familiar words have been inserted, such as ben. brae, callant, canny, clachan, darts, dander, dunt, fash, flyte, glow, gowk, havers, hoots, jalouse, kenspeckle, kittle, kyle, kyte, lum, ooss, pech, ploy, quaich, scunner, shilpit, shoogle, siller, skelp, skirl, smeddum, smirr, snowk, sonsy, speer, stot (bounce), stow, stramash, thole, thrapple, thow-less, tirrivee, wean (child), wersh, wheesht.

Among the more interesting old-fashioned additions may be mentioned the collection of nouns of assemblage in paragraph 72. In addition to the familiar flock, herd, drove, pack, there are listed the distinctive terms sounder (of swine), skulk (of foxes), pride (of lions), charm (of finches), flush (of mallards), gaggle (of geese), and wedge (of swans). To old patrons of the work this list should make up for the omission of the tedious and pointless catalogue of different methods of divination, from aeromancy to sciomancy, which was formerly given as a footnote under Prediction (511).

Very few changes have been made in the original grouping. The list of types of tobacco-pipe has been transferred from the Air-pipe paragraph to the Tobacco section, where it will naturally be more in keeping. The account of religious terms towards the end of the book has been rearranged so that dissenters and nonconformists are no longer grouped with idolaters, fire-worshippers, and other heathens under the comprehensive but hardly explicit heading of Heterodoxy. A number of foreign words and phrases have been omitted, particularly the more out-of-the-way Latin phrases, which are no longer so popular as in the days when Classics and culture were synonymous. Finally, many words, like caisson, chaperon, chateau, which were formerly italicized as foreign are now printed in ordinary characters, having been accepted as English.

A clear idea of the extent of the volume's expansion can be gathered from the size of the index, which occupies 744 columns as against 608 somewhat shorter columns in the last Everyman edition. The opportunity has been taken of arranging the alphabetization of the references according to the up-to-date ' nothing-before-something' system set out in the pamphlet on Alphabetical Arrangement published by the British Standards Institution. By this system phrases are inserted in order after their initial word, and hyphened words are reckoned as two except when the initial component is merely a prefix. Every attempt has been made to render the index as complete as possible, and the process of hunting the required word in the body of the work has been further simplified by the insertion of numerous cross-references in those cases where one paragraph is closely related to others.

1952.

D. C. B.