thesaurus

In the early 19th century, archaeologists borrowed the Latin word thesaurus to denote an ancient treasury, such as that of a temple. Soon after, the word was metaphorically applied to a book containing a "treasury" of words or information about a particular field. In 1852, the English scholar Peter Mark Roget published his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, in which he listed a treasury of related words organized into numerous categories. This work led to the common acceptance of the term "thesaurus" for "a book of words and their synonyms." Finally, during the 1950s, "thesaurus" began being used in the field of word processing to refer to a list of related terms used for indexing and retrieval.