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 for it. Get into the celebration of fancy words and let out your vocabulary skills to others. A thesaurus is a reference book that has been useful to all sorts of people for hundreds of years. It has made people 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 founder of the day are unknown. There is no exact mention of the year since this day was celebrated. However, the idea for this celebration Day would have been initiated by someone who has infinite love for the language and its different forms of words. The date is precisely chosen as it was on the same date in 1779 when Peter Mark Roget, who was the author of Roget’s Thesaurus, was born. To honor 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 it in 1852.
The first publication of this book has 15,000 words. It has been 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 ideas and concepts instead of alphabetically. Since then, it has never been out of print to date and is still a broadly used work from across the English-speaking world. The thesaurus is a reference work with a list of words grouped together according to the similarity of meaning with synonyms and antonyms. The book is designed in such a way as to draw distinctions between words of similar types and thus assist the users in choosing exactly the right word for usage.
Other Celebrations on January 18
January 18 is also celebrated as
How to Celebrate the Day
Take out the Thesaurus book and find some new similar words which you know already. Use them when you speak to others. Expanding the knowledge of vocabulary will help people combat 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 social media using the hashtag #ThesaurusDay.
Thank you for reading the post. You can celebrate every day with Happydays365.org and Happy Thesaurus Day 2024.