Roget Invented the Thesaurus at Age 73
Being nuts, it turns out, was in his blood: His grandmother was mentally unstable, his mother was nearly psychotic and his sister and daughter had suffered severe mental breakdowns. As if that wasn’t enough, his father and wife died young, and one time his uncle slit his throat in front of him. Peter was actually the sane one in the family, or as it was known to people who weren’t in his family, “still crazier than a shit house rat.”
.. The only thing that seemed to calm him was making lists, a somewhat creepy hobby he’d had since childhood. When he retired from medicine at 61, he realized he might as well spend all day making one huge, all-encompassing list of all the things ever — so that’s exactly what he did.
The Success:
Twelve years later, at age 73, Peter Roget published his giant list of words as a book, Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases … otherwise known as “the thesaurus.”