Peter Mark Roget
English physician and philologist
- Lived
- 1779–1869
Updated September 2026
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All free classicsAbout Peter Mark Roget
Peter Mark Roget was a British physician, natural theologian, lexicographer, and founding secretary of The Portico Library. He is best known for publishing, in 1852, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, a classified collection of related words (thesaurus). In 1824, he read a paper to the Royal Society about a peculiar optical illusion which is often (falsely) regarded as the origin of the ancient persistence of vision theory that was later commonly, yet incorrectly, used to explain apparent motion in film and animation.
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Sources: book lists and dates from Wikidata and Open Library, ratings from Open Library readers, free texts from Project Gutenberg. Last updated September 2026.

