Lexicon · The human story of meaning
Thesaurus
Fully specified name: Thesaurus (concept)
A vocabulary that records relationships among terms, including alternatives and broader or narrower terms.
- Scope note
- An associative link is not equivalence.
- Synonyms
- None recorded as true synonyms in this context.
- Monograph
- Thesaurus (planned; brief only)
- External mappings
- None recorded. In W0 no mapping to SNOMED CT® or any external authority is asserted for this entry. A future mapping record will carry source system, identifier, version, relation type, evidence, author, confidence where meaningful, and review state.
- Formal status
- Editorial entry only. It is not part of any released ontology and a prose edit here changes no formal definition.
Draft. This entry is an unreviewed draft. Its sources have not been checked by a named person and no domain reviewer has approved it. Treat every claim as provisional.
Notes
A thesaurus, in the information-retrieval sense, organizes terms rather than things. It records a preferred term, its alternative terms, broader and narrower terms, and related terms that a searcher might also want. Its purpose is retrieval: a reader who searches one word should find documents indexed under another. The everyday thesaurus of near-synonyms for writers is a different tool with a similar name.
The scope note matters in practice. A thesaurus may link "radioligand therapy" and "dosimetry" as related terms because readers interested in one often want the other. That link does not say the terms mean the same thing, and it does not say one is a kind of the other. When a thesaurus is imported into a knowledge system as if its associative links were Relationship assertions, the result is a graph that looks richly connected and says nothing checkable. The entry on Synonym covers the stricter case where two terms do refer to the same Concept in a stated context; the entry on Controlled vocabulary covers the governance that keeps preferred terms stable.