The man who made lists tells the dark and fascinating story of peter roget , the eccentric victorian physician born into a family marked by melancholia and madness , who escaped by devoting his life to an obsession with categorizing and analyzing words .
One of his later projects was the creation of wordnet , a database of the english language that philip n. johnson-laird , a princeton colleague , described as a computerized version of " roget 's thesaurus . "