A thesaurus, a collection of synonyms, derives its name from the Latin word thesaurus, or literally, “treasury.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Origin of the Word “Thesaurus””
I got a call from Quinn in Wyoming who was asking about the term thesaurus.
And it was one of those cases of knowing just enough to be dangerous.
He was saying, well, you know, the word theos in Greek means God and sauros means lizard like brontosaurus or dinosaur, you know, which is a frightening lizard. So isn’t a thesaurus a god lizard?
I, for one, welcome our new overlords, they say.
Yeah. All hail the thesaurus. So I was just going to say to Quinn that it looks like it might come from Greek and Latin words that mean god lizard, but actually a thesaurus in Latin is a treasury.
And in antiquity, you would see temples and then they might have a thesaurus next to them that literally held treasure. It’s sort of like one of my favorite words in the English language anthology, which literally means a gathering of flowers.
So a thesaurus and an anthology are both collections of really cool things. And in French and Spanish, their words for treasure look a lot more like the word thesaurus. Tesoro.
Yeah, than you might think. Yeah. Yeah, in English. Yeah, exactly. 877-929-9673.
