Roget's Thesaurus, 6th Edition

This is another book to add to your personal library if you are the type of person who has ever had to find that special word that says it all.

I am a copywriter and I find this thesaurus very useful. It has a different approach to wording. The only thing is that rarely you might not be finding a word you are looking for, yet, it is creative and it works well. I would recommend this thesaurus to every writer or student preparing their projects or writing their essays.

First off I think Roget's Thesaurus is the best book ever written. I use various versions constantly.

Roget's International Thesaurus, with its index in the back for locating words, is for me as a crossword addict and professional writer the most helpful thesaurus.

The other versions have alphabetized entries like a dictionary and give you far fewer words from which to choose.

My old edition is so worn out the cover has fallen off. My only criticism is that I wish it would be printed in hardback.

After loosing my older edition of a Roget's Thesaurus that I acquired several years ago, I was thrilled to get my hands on the newest release. I love the set up, and that there are so many more words than other thesauruses, but am quite disappointed with the index.

In the earlier edition I owed, almost half of the book was made up of the index, I am pretty sure nearly every word in the thesaurus was listed in the there. And although it was a lot to get through to find a single word, it was useful for other things, such as a finding the spelling of a word, or perusing through a section when I couldn't think of exactly what word was coming to mind.

The index in this edition is pathetic by comparison. It takes up less than five percent of the size of the book. Automatically, that tells me that only about five percent of the words in the book are indexed, which is a terrible waste. Why even have an index at that point?

I do not intend do stop using this thesaurus just because I can no longer trust the index to be a great source of help. I'm sure I'll eventually learn how to locate words using the Synopsis of Categories at the beginning of the book. But I will greatly miss the extensive index of my previous edition.