I’m old enough to remember physical dictionaries and thesauri. I even have one of each on my bookshelf in my living room, although I rarely open these days.
We all know the process. Open book. Look up word. See what’s similar. Repeat as necessary.
Except it doesn’t have to be. There are sites like Thesaurus.net. If you’re looking for a more visual one, though, check out the Visual Thesaurus. The latter is a completely innovative way of thinking about synonyms. Typing in confuse gives you this:
Simon Says: If visualizing synonyms is possible, then what isn’t?
You. Can. Visualize. Just. About. Everything.
Feedback
What say you?
Glad you wrote about the Visual Thesaurus. Not many people seem to know about it. Have you ever come across a similar tool which would allow me to upload a list of words and visualize the relationship between them. I’d like to end up with a network map where the largest nodes are the words with the most synonyms. Thanks!
I have not. That sounds like a neat project.
Closest I’ve heard of is ngrams from Google:
https://books.google.com/ngrams
And this is pretty neat…
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22define+mellifluous%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=rcs