Today, January 18th, is celebrated as National Thesaurus Day in honor of the birthdate in 1779 of Peter Mark Roget who gave us the first thesaurus in 1852. Roget, who was born in London and was a British physician and lexicographer, started his work of research in 1848 and finished it 4 years later with 15,000 words. What we know today as “Roget’s Thesuraus” was first published under the title “Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition.”

THAT’S a mouthful!

But accurate.

When I was a wee little Word Of Jeff and would ask my mom what a word meant, she would point me to the Webster’s Dictionary and tell me to look it up. A few years later, when I was in school and had to write a report, she and my dad bought a set of encyclopedias for me and my younger brother to use for research. And at some point, when I was doing more than just parroting what I read in the encyclopedias and expressing myself more fully in those reports, she introduced me to Roget’s Thesaurus.

Ever since then, until online resources were available, there were always two books on my desk or on a nearby bookshelf; Webster’s Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus. Today I keep a physical copy of each book in case the Internet collapses, but mostly make use of online sites like dictionary.com and thesaurus.com to inform my speaking and writing.

But as someone who first wanted to expand my vocabulary as a child and then later as a writer and speaker, Roget’s Thesaurus was like a goldmine to me. No one wants to read, or hear a speaker say, the same word for something over and over, if at all possible. With a thesaurus at our fingertips, we can expand our vocabulary and move beyond writing or saying we are happy repetitively. A look inside a thesuraus lets us say or write that we are glad, delighted, overjoyed, ecstatic, jubilant, elated, gleeful or joyous.

And if we want to find a word that is the opposite of happy, a thesaurus can point us that way to with antonyms that help us say we are unhappy, sorrowful, miserable, troubled, hopeless, or morose.

So today, I want to express to you that I am thrilled, excited, delirious, psyched, pumped and tickled pink to say Happy National Thesaurus Day.