Thesaurus Day

Thesaurus Day

Thesaurus Day is a fun celebration observed on January 18th of every year. The love for the language wouldn’t stop when any person has an infinite craze on it. Get into the celebration of fancy words and let out your vocabulary skills to others. Thesaurus is a reference book that has been useful to all sorts of people for hundreds of years. It has made people be more knowledgeable thereby improving the quality of their literary work. Thesaurus Day celebrates the Thesaurus book and the birth anniversary of Peter Mark Roget, a British lexicographer and physician.

“As a person with the retentive mental capacity of a goldfish and a dislike of repetition, I frequently make use of the thesaurus built into my Microsoft Word U.K.” – Software. Meg Rosoff

History of Thesaurus Day

The origin, history, and the founder of the Thesaurus Day are unknown. There is no exact mention about the year since this Day has been celebrated. However, the idea for this celebration Day would have been initiated by someone who has infinite love for the language and its different form of words. The date is precisely chosen as it was on the same date in 1779, Peter Mark Roget who was the author of Roget’s Thesaurus was born. As to honour his incredible work, a Day has been created in the calendar. Roget was a British lexicographer and physician who compiled the first modern thesaurus in 1805 and published in 1852.

The first publication of this book has 15,000 words. It has organized into six primary categories such as existence, quantity, relation, number, and time. The present-day Roget’s Thesaurus has 230,000 words that are still organized by the ideas and concepts as opposed to alphabetically. Since then, it has never been out of print till date and is still a broadly used work from across the English-speaking world. The thesaurus is a reference work that has a list of words grouped together according to the similarity of meaning with synonyms and antonyms. The book is designed in such a way to draw distinctions between words of similar types and thus assisting the users to choose exactly the right word for usage.

How to Celebrate Thesaurus Day

Celebrating the Thesaurus Day is very simple. Take out the Thesaurus book and find some new similar words for which you know already. Use them when you speak with others. Expanding the knowledge of vocabulary will make people combat against mental illness and depression. Organize a party in your home by inviting your family and friends to play a synonym game to enjoy the Day. Share your Thesaurus celebration pictures and views on the social media using the hashtag #ThesaurusDay.