Roget22 on diary

Roget22 Is Back Again

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 09:47:43 -0600

Well, after about a year of inactivity (partially my fault, partially not) I’m back to the Roget 22 project. If you don’t remember what this is about, I can hardly blame you; here’s the post where I explained things .

I’m not going to make any big predictions or lay out a lot in the way of plans right now, but I did just re-read my last batch up devlog entries, and some things have changed from my thinking at that point. So here’s a list of what’s happening:

Roget22 Dev Diary 0003

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 11:16:54 -0700

Sometimes when you work on something long enough you get tunnel vision. This is a pretty well-known phenomenon, and I had a particularly intense episode of it around the Roget22 project – but I now see a clearer, easier path to making things happen.

Yes, compared to what I last wrote.

I don’t think the why of it is particularly difficult to describe or understand. Many years of dealing with bottomlessly problematic source material led to the following assumptions:

Roget22 Dev Diary 0002

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 22:57:04 -0700

I almost started scanning today, but I didn’t. Instead I sat down and started working on the hairiest problem not caused by PG’s edits over the years: references.

In a modern paper edition of Roget’s, references to other headwords look something like TERM 584.2 to indicate that for other terms similar in meaning to TERM, refer to sense 2 of headword 584.

This is largely inherited from Roget’s original design of argument &c 476, read as “for more terms like this meaning of ‘argument’, see headword 476”. But there are also variants like manifest &c (be evidence of) 467 where the reader is pointed into a specific sense of a headword by use of another term, because early editions did not number the senses within a headword.

Roget22 is back (Dev Diary 0001)

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 12:51:12 -0600

One of my longest-running projects is about to come out of dormancy, again. The thing that would eventually get the name “Roget22” started in, I believe, 2004, when I stumbled on the OCR’d text of the 1921 edition of Roget’s Thesaurus on the Project Gutenberg site.

For the unfamiliar, I point you toward the wiki entry for Project Gutenberg (hereafter “PG”).

According to the credits in the file, the original OCR job had been done in 1984 at MICRA Corp. However, it turns out that MICRA is still around, and their own website contradicts this on a few grounds: