You say there’s no other word for thesaurus? I say, wrong, incorrect, awry, untrue, false, off-target, inexact, inaccurate, mistaken, counterfactual, specious, ungrounded, spurious, ixnay, not!
It’s a classic one-liner associated with comedian Steven Wright, whose delivery makes monotone seem operatic: “What’s another word for thesaurus?” Clever line. Bad etymology.
The word thesaurus has numerous synonyms—so many that you could fill a magazine with them. So many you could fill a warehouse with them. A storehouse even, or perhaps a treasury, a depository, a repository, an armory, a stockpile, a chest, a compendium, a vault, a hoard, a promptuary, a reservoir ... all of which, you have likely guessed by now, are words that you would legitimately find in a thesaurus of thesauri.
Our word thesaurus came to us ultimately from Greek, through Latin and then through Roget. But let’s back up a few centuries before Mr. Roget stepped in with his innovative and much-celebrated word organization. In Greek, the word was thesauros, meaning “treasury or the treasure within,” “storehouse,” and “chest.” In Latin, the word was spelled as we spell it now, which you should regret because it opened me up to that sad thesauri joke above.
When the word came to English in the 1500s, it had primarily figurative use as a collection of knowledge—so, in that sense, dictionary is another word for thesaurus, and so is encyclopedia. Peter Mark Roget’s particular collection of knowledge—grouping similar words by ideas—could well have been published as a Treasury of English Words and Phrases, but a synonym for treasury was chosen instead. Over the years, the book was so successful (Roget himself supervised more than a dozen subsequent editions over the next seventeen years until his death in 1869) that the meaning of thesaurus was narrowed to a specific type of collection.
Now, when I first said you could fill a magazine with thesaurus synonyms, I meant magazine as a synonym of warehouse or storehouse, which was the original meaning of the word—and a meaning that remains. A print magazine is a treasury or collection of articles, just as a gun magazine is a collection of bullets. Some years back, a media commentator, apparently forgetting that he owned a dictionary, fumed over CBS’s 60 Minutes calling itself a “television magazine.” Magazine it is, as it collects things—stories. And you could even call 60 Minutes a television thesaurus.
Now, I’m wondering (and I’m certain that I’m not the first): What if you don’t know the meaning of dictionary? Or did Steven Wright already beat me to that line? 5
58 Hmm, because thesaurus is ultimately a Greek word, should we should respell it as hoisaurus ... (see “Hoi Polloi" on page 29 for my smarmy explanation of that little jibe).
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Bill Brohaugh