Help me send the Microsoft Word Thesaurus the way of the Stegosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, and Brontosaurus: to extinction.

December 1, 2007 8:36 PM

Is there any way to improve the thesaurus in Microsoft Word? (Or for that matter, recommend another word processor with a better thesaurus.) I'm willing to pay, even.

The thesaurus in Microsoft Word really helps me out, but I'm often surprised at the lack of words, bad interface, etc.. Is there any way to improve it? (New configuration, downloadable add-on pack, etc.)

posted by dkleinst to computers & internet (5 comments total)

I should mention I'm using Word 2003 on a Windows XP SP2 machine.
posted by dkleinst at 8:37 PM on December 1, 2007

I use WordWeb. You just click a word, press a hotkey and it pops up with definitions and whatnot. It is online, it references wikipedia and is free(as long as you don't own an SUV or fly more than 4 times a year) or you can pay $29 for a "pro" version with "6,000" more definitions.

It works any window so it is useful when browsing the internet too.
posted by M Edward at 10:36 PM on December 1, 2007

OR you could just use a website such as this. It's easy, fast and it gives A LOT of words.
posted by alexplainlater at 10:50 PM on December 1, 2007

To tack on to alexplainlater's recommendation for thesaurus.reference.com, if you're using Firefox, it's really easy to create a bookmark to http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/ and give it a keyword like "t", so that you can type "t whatever" in your address bar and get the search results for "whatever."

If you use IE, check out Searchy for the same.
posted by electric_counterpoint at 11:43 PM on December 1, 2007

I found the thesaurus interface for Word 2004 (for Mac) is much improved over Word 2003/2007
Word 2004 includes encarta dictionary definitions which appear on the fly as you select words in the thesaurus.

The only down-side of running Word on a Mac is the 'grammar check as you type' which is horribly slow - so I just turned it off and run the grammar check manually when I need it.
posted by Lanark at 5:49 AM on December 2, 2007