wordage.info

[Vertigo]

Has anyone come across this site:

Wordage.info - Free Thesaurus Tool for Word Discovery - Expanded Thesaurus, Reverse Dictionary Lookup

It says it is beta so I guess it's quite new. I think it is seriously neat, better than any of the dictionaries and thesauruses (thesauri?) that I have tried before. You can enter a word or a description of a word and will it will give you synonyms and - the bit I think is really neat - other 'related' words. And all of those words are clickable themselves. You can wander around for ages gradually drifting through different areas of the language. Just seems really clever to me. You need to try it to see what I mean.

[The Judge]

Hmmm. Have just tried it for myself with "simulacrum" and I can't say I'm over-impressed at its definition nor its synonyms starting with "Prospero" and ending with "wise". But it's like all of these things -- they are good servants but poor masters. It's important to check usage and definitions of words which are unfamiliar, and perhaps to use another dictionary as well. But the more word banks we have the better, I say, so thanks for bringing it up.

I'll be playing around with it a little more later on, but in the meantime I think this is more a writing resource than a workshop matter, so I'll move it over.

[Boneman]

Thanks Vertigo - the way I use my thesaurus, I'm going to have to list it in the acknowledgements in the front of my book. It will take some getting used to, and I'm not really sure I want it on my toolbar, but a useful addition in my never-ending search for another word for 'run' - apparently 'absquatulate' is a related word... "He absquatulated down the road at speed" doesn't quite hack it, but I do like the way it gives a lot of examples of the usage of the word. Some nerds have been working very hard putting it all together.

[Ursa major]

Originally Posted by Boneman

"He absquatulated down the road at speed" doesn't quite hack it....

Indeed so, to the extent that the narrator may find it necessary to decamp ASAP.



(I am, of course, basing this on the first definition of the adjective, camp, to be found in Wiktionary: "Theatrical; making exaggerated gestures.")

[Vertigo]

Sorry TJ you're absolutely right - I don't really know my way around this part of the forum... yet!

Re the synonyms, it certainly generates a lot more of them than most thesauruses (i? still not sure) and an awful lot of them are pretty loose, maybe derived from slang usage, I'm not sure. I certainly wouldn't want to use it for definitions and would look up any unknown word I picked up from it. And I must admit some of the related words seem more like synonyms than some of the actual given synonyms. However I actually quite like that; when looking up a synonym for a word, sometimes the original word is not quite right in the first place and a related word that is not technically a synonym might be just what I was looking for.

And Boneman, yes I must admit the thought went through my mind too, about how all those links were put together in the first place.

[J Riff]

It's handy, tho' it didn't do well with cullions, disembogued, jaeger or wittold. Add to bookmarks. Done. One more tool is cool.

[Vertigo]

Yes I've found some distinct gaps, but I do like the fact that it's synonyms are much looser than some thesauri, You do get an awful lot sometimes, but that can be useful when you have a word that's not quite right.

[digs]

It looks pretty cool! In my excitement, I clicked the link and then had a massive mental blank and couldn't think of a single word to type in. After 10 or so seconds of panicked nothingness, the first word that came to mind was 'preen'. What does that say about me?

P.S. It did lead me to an awesome new word though. Bedizen: dress up garishly and tastelessly or decorate tastelessly.

[Mouse]

I could only think of 'pontificate.' And that brought up the Vatican.

[Vertigo]

I like bedizen, good word that one. And, Mouse, in fairness I guess its pretty inevitable that pontificate would bring up the Vatican. Though in fairness it does being up a lot of other words as well. I must admit sometimes I stuggle to see the relationship. I suspect they might just match any (significant)words in the description to any other words that use the same words in their descriptions.

It's actually quite fun to wnader around from word to word in it.

[The Judge]

To be strictly accurate what thesauri do is not provide synonyms as such, but rather a collection of words with some -- often tenuous -- connection, which is why the relationship can appear very strained in some cases. In Roget's it's described as "a collection of words and phrases classified according to underlying concepts and meanings", and to me this is still the best.

You're not the only one to wander, Vertigo! It's easy to get lost in the thickets of English verbiage, finding one jewel of a word after another. Trouble is, I find them and then want to use them, and I'm tempted to shove them in scenes where they don't go just so I can get them in somewhere.

[Ursa major]

It's almost as if one needs a character who scours the Internet/Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (depending on genre) in order to regale other characters with the words they have just discovered.

[The Judge]

Now, that's what I call an idea...



.... or a concept, notion, thought, invention, brain wave...