Thesaurus is a dictionary of "treasure"

Thesaurus is a dictionary with advanced capabilities. The word "thesaurus" has entered our life relatively recently. It has a foreign origin and the ear of a Russian-speaking person is perceived as unusual. To some people it still seems ridiculous and incomprehensible, and even now one can sometimes hear the question of what a "tusuarus" is. And someone to him has long been accustomed to. Let's try to figure out what it is, where it came from and why.

The etymology of the word "thesaurus"

This word is of Greek origin and literally translated as "treasure". Initially, the thesaurus denoted an ordinary dictionary, supplemented by semantic relations, defined by grouping of words and broken down into headings. The consonance of the word with the common names of dinosaur species has become the basis for many memes, logos, pictures, where the thesaurus appears in the form of a lizard, reading a book or wearing glasses. Now we can say that the dinosaur has become a symbol of the dictionary.

From the history of the dictionary

It was first published in 1852 in England. Later it was re-released in 1962. The dictionary was published under the editorship of PM Roget and contained 1040 headings, with 240 thousand words distributed over them. To the thesauri are also very similar monolingual dictionaries, for example, the dictionary of Ozhegov, which gives expression to the semantic parameters of each of almost hundreds of thousands of words. In the 70's. The last century acquired the popularity of the information retrieval thesaurus. This is a special kind of dictionaries, where lexical units are identified - descriptors.

Descriptors

What does thesaurus with descriptors mean? What is it and what are they for? With their help, you can automatically search for any documentary information. Each word in such a dictionary has a synonymous descriptor. In addition, the genus-species and associative relations are indicated. For example, published in the USSR in 1973 "Informational and Search Thesaurus in Informatics" for each descriptor provides a dictionary article, which indicates synonyms, generic-species, associative descriptors. This helps a better orientation in associative connections. With automated information retrieval, you can find documents in which, in addition to the request descriptor, the index also contains semantically related words. The thesaurus is a source of information that allows us to identify specific associative relations specific to a particular thematic area. For example, the disease is a causative agent, the device is a measurable unit. Thus, the user can get information not only about the morphology, meaning, etymology of the word, but also about the field of its application, the phenomena connected with it, about specific terminology. Thesaurus is a dictionary whose task is to provide the most complete and comprehensive information.

Thesaurus in philology

The meaning of the word "thesaurus" in the expanded sense means a complete description of the entire system of knowledge about the surrounding reality, which is possessed by an individual carrier of information or a group of carriers. This medium acts as a receiver for additional information. The original thesaurus determines the capabilities of the receiver when receiving semantic information. This notion is considered not only by philologists. He is interesting and specialists in other areas. For example, it is considered by psychologists. In addition, it is of interest to those who develop systems equipped with artificial intelligence. In sociology and the theory of communication relations, the properties of thesauri are considered for individuals and collectives, which provide an opportunity for mutual understanding based on the commonality of thesauri.

Thesaurus in everyday life

The term has entered into various scientific contexts. It is most applicable to those areas that originated in the areas of the boundaries of science. Constant complementarity, variability, progression gives him a number of properties. In the practical sense, the thesaurus is a functional system that ensures the viability of a social subject in interaction with other systems. Simply put, we are talking about the form of the existence of humanitarian knowledge, in word and in a way that reproduces part of the existing reality.