Roget's Thesaurus (1911) Now Freely Available Online
A digital edition of the 1911 Roget's Thesaurus, manually transcribed by MICRA Inc. in 1988, is now freely accessible online. This historical reference work, originally compiled by Peter Mark Roget, remains a cornerstone for writers and researchers. The digital version, hosted by the University of Chicago, offers a searchable interface and preserves the original text, making it a valuable resource for linguistic and semantic studies.
This digital edition of Roget's Thesaurus (1911) was originally prepared by MICRA Inc. in 1988 through manual transcription.
- bradrn
I’ve been using https://the-saurus.org/ lately to get access to the hierarchy, since reading https://blog.plover.com/2026/08/02/ on its use a couple of weeks ago.
- somat
As a interesting tangent consider the data structure and the data behind a thesaurus. I was using the wordnet data for a project. https://wordnet.princeton.edu My first pass was to do the modern thing and just load the entire data into memory, it would fit with no problem. But when I noticed their screwball dataformat was designed to be dynamically accessed from disk I could not resist and rewrote the whole thing to do just that. Probably a waste of time but it was a lot of fun to write.
For what it is worth every reference word is coupled to a byte offset so lookups are a simple seek away. Today we would just jam it in a sqlite db and call it a day(salutes to sqlite for making this so easy) But I thought it was really clever.
- timcobb
A click downstream: https://micra.com