Editing Roget's Thesaurus (section)

== Content ==
Roget described his thesaurus in the foreword to the first edition:

{{blockquote|It is now nearly fifty years since I first projected a system of verbal classification similar to that on which the present work is founded. Conceiving that such a compilation might help to supply my own deficiencies, I had, in the year 1805, completed a classed catalogue of words on a small scale, but on the same principle, and nearly in the same form, as the Thesaurus now published.{{sfnp|Lloyd|1982|p=xix}}}}

''Roget's Thesaurus'' is composed of six primary classes.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://poets.notredame.ac.jp/Roget/contents.html |title=Table of contents |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20130316070554/http://poets.notredame.ac.jp/Roget/contents.html |archivedate=March 16, 2013 }}</ref> Each class is composed of multiple divisions and then sections. This may be conceptualized as a tree containing over a thousand branches for individual "meaning clusters" or semantically linked words. Although these words are not strictly [[synonyms]], they can be viewed as colours or connotations of a meaning or as a spectrum of a concept.{{cn|date=February 2022}} One of the most general words is chosen to typify the spectrum as its headword, which labels the whole group.