Roget's International Thesaurus, 8th Edition

Now THIS is a thesaurus. Previously I had one that was arranged alphabetically. I got it because it was a "writer's thesaurus." But when writing, sometimes the word you are really looking for is skew to the word you thought you were looking for. This is a far better tool.

The original design, not dictionary style.

Publisher's fault that the pages don't line up evenly, but Amazon shipping didn't protect this book at all in how they shipped it. We tried twice to replace, but none were okay, hard or soft copy.

I've been using an alphabetically ordered thesaurus since grade school, so I was a little worried about moving to the thematically organized version, but I was quickly entranced. I find the categories a very useful way of organizing and finding words. If you want to give a certain tone to a paragraph, I can scan the category list for terms like "Peace", "Laxness", "Freedom", or conversely "Confinement", "Strictness", "Failure", and under each is a veritable cornucopia of words with multiple sub-categories. In other words, it is not only useful when you have a word you want to find a synonym for, it is useful for seeing what types of atmospheres you could give to your writing, and for perceiving whole related categories of words you can use. Conceptual synonyms, if you will, not just related words, but related categories of words.I have found myself thoroughly absorbed in the book, bringing it with me to various places and thumbing through the various categories. It is lovely.Old-time users of this thesaurus are complaining vociferously regarding the change to the index. I never used previous editions of this, so I don't know what they are talking about. But it seems very easy to me. Say I want synonyms of "loud". I go to the index and see all the places the word is mentioned. I now bring my forefingers to the contents page with the category list. I can easily see these at the same time. I notice, for example, that "loud" appears in 35.20 and 53.11. I can quickly and easily see that category 35 is "Color" whereas category 53 is "Loudness". If what I am looking for is words about actual sounds, then I know to go to category 53 and skip category 35. I don't see that listing this out in the index is necessary, the information is easily finable.Although old-time users argue that this is a useless book because the index makes it hard to use, I bought it anyway because it is said to have almost 100 thousand terms more than the previous edition. I got it, and I don't think the index is hard to use at all, and I love the enormous variety of words in here. I would take the extra 100K words over the old, uselessly bloated index any day. Ignore the noise, get this magnificent reference volume. If you're like me, with overpowering philological passions, you'll find it is a bit like a teddy bear and a safety blanket rolled into one.

In recent years I've been writing quite a bit at work and in my avocations; and doing many more crossword puzzles. This book is used extensively. My old version of Roget had taken such a horrible beating that it was time to buy another one. While there are quite a number of fine thesauri and specialized synonym finders available Roget's Thesaurus stands out. It's not the only book I use but is one of the first I grab when I need help. This is one book everyone should have on their bookshelf. There are cheaper decent thesauri but I say bite the bullet and pay the $30 asking price for this book. It's worth the money.

The English word Bible

It was too heavy to bring to South America with me, but I’m sure it was very through.

If you love words, you need this thesaurus. It's the gold standard. And it's fun.

I received the book in good condition, but was saddened when I opened the package. The manufacturers of the book had omitted the thumb indexes, and the printed paper was below the quality that such a volume merited.All evidence of cutting back on production costs. Such a pity. This book deserved better. Other than that, it is a fine book. Comprehensive and helpful.

A great resource. Easy to navigate. Arrived promptly. Appropriately packaged. Good price. Only reason why 4 stars given is due to the texture and inferior quality of the paper pages which is not liked, also the outer boookcover was quite disheveled as if used or had been on display and moved about, hence signs of use.. Otherwise seller and book recommended.

Recommended

The media could not be loaded.  Excellent productDelivery on time.

Value for money