Although including synonyms, a thesaurus should not be taken as a complete list of all the synonyms for a particular word. The entries are also designed for drawing distinctions between similar words and assisting in choosing exactly the right word. Unlike a dictionary, a thesaurus entry does not define words.
The word "thesaurus" is derived from 16th-century New Latin, in turn from Latin thesaurus, which is the latinisation of the Greek (thēsauros), literally "treasure store", generally meaning a collection of things which are of big importance or value (and thus the medieval rank of thesaurer was a synonym for treasurer). This meaning has been largely supplanted by Roget's usage of the term.
In information technology, a thesaurus represents a database or list of semantically orthogonal topical search keys. In the field of Artificial Intelligence, a thesaurus may sometimes be referred to as an ontology.
Thesauri for information retrieval are typically constructed by information specialists, and have their own unique vocabulary defining different kinds of terms and relationships:
Terms are the basic semantic units for conveying concepts. They are usually single-word nouns, since nouns are the most concrete part of speech. Verbs can be converted to nouns – "cleans" to "cleaning", "reads" to "reading", and so on. Adjectives and adverbs, however, seldom convey any meaning useful for indexing. When a term is ambiguous, a “scope note” can be added to ensure consistency, and give direction on how to interpret the term. Not every term needs a scope note, but their presence is of considerable help in using a thesaurus correctly and reaching a correct understanding of the given field of knowledge.
"Term relationships" are links between terms. These relationships can be divided into three types: hierarchical, equivalency or associative.
For multilingual vocabularies, the ISO 5964 Guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual thesauri can be applied.
Thesaurus Construction and Use: a practical manual. Jean Aitchison, Allan Gilchrist and David Bawden. London and New York: Europa Publications (2000).
Category:Knowledge representation Category:Greek loanwords Category:Reference works Category:Dictionaries by type
ar:مكنز bg:Тезаурус ca:Tesaurus cs:Tezaurus da:Tesaurus de:Thesaurus es:Tesauro eo:Tezaŭro fa:اصطلاحنامه fr:Thésaurus ko:시소러스 hy:Թեզաուրուս hi:समान्तर कोश hr:Tezaurus io:Tezauro id:Tesaurus is:Samheitaorðabók it:Thesaurus he:אגרון kk:Тезаурус lb:Thesaurus lt:Tezauras hu:Tezaurusz mk:Тезаурус ml:തെസോറസ് nl:Thesaurus ja:シソーラス no:Tesaurus nn:Tesaurus pl:Tezaurus pt:Tesauro ru:Тезаурус simple:Thesaurus sk:Tezaurus sl:Tezaver fi:Tesaurus sv:Synonymordbok th:อรรถาภิธาน tr:Tesarus uk:Тезаурус zh:索引典This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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