Page:Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (1894).djvu/17

Rh book finds it more convenient to have recourse to the Index first. It thus becomes a very important part of the work.

From the peculiar nature and use of the Thesaurus, its Index will be found to differ, in some of its essential functions, from an alphabetical table of contents. The present Index does not merely afford an indication of the place where every given word or topic occurs or is dealt with in the text; but it is intended as a guide to other expressions which may be found there. The word we look out in this Index is not that which we require, but that which we wish to avoid. It is, therefore, not necessary that every word there given should be a repetition of one in the text. It may even happen that the word selected as a guide, though suggestive of the group wanted, is wholly unfit to be comprised within it. On this account many references have been inserted in the Index when the word given will not itself be found in the text.

The new Index contains not only all the words in the book (without needless repetition of conjugate forms), but likewise the phrases, all of which had been excluded from the Index to the previous editions. This extensive enlargement has been made in the belief that many ideas present themselves to the mind in the form of a combination of several words. It is hoped that these additions, although they increase the bulk of the book, will have the effect of extending its usefulness in at least a corresponding degree.

Some changes of detail have also been made, where the form of the work seemed susceptible of improvement, and there was no reason to suppose that the author would have disapproved of the alteration. In the previous editions, the phrases were in general placed in separate paragraphs, under the heading Phr., in each of the subdivisions assigned to the different grammatical parts of speech comprised within nearly every category. In the present edition, words and phrases are placed together, and the latter are arranged as if the nouns, adjectives, &c., to which they are regarded as equivalent, were expressible in single words. The heading Phr. is only employed in the case of phrases which have no convenient place in such an arrangement. The grouping of words within each category, in stricter accordance with their meaning, is thus facilitated; and a subheading is dispensed with, which had a tendency to confuse the eye. Much space has been saved, and many repetitions have been avoided, by the use of lines and hyphens, where words or phrases in the same group have syllables or parts in common, and by references from one part of speech to another. These abbreviations may be best explained by examples, of which the following are a few:—