Replacing my favorite thesaurus now that it's more "efficient"?

April 29, 2008 12:03 AM

Recommendations for a good, verbose online thesaurus for wandering through words? thesaurus.com seems to have changed how they serve search results and my working style is screwed.

I use thesaurus.com for hours a day. Their overly detailed results, as well as weird and obscure words that aren't even defined on dictionary.com, were perfect for the way I work (in naming).

I take a few days off, however, and "smart" has 8 results? I used to get pages of entries that were even vaguely related to smart, allowing me to travel interesting pathways and ideas.

I've tried Merriam-Webster's thesaurus and it works the limited and terrible way thesaurus.com does - great for the practical writer, not so great for a word wanderer. onelook.com is great for some applications, but their "limit to a specific concept" is wonky at best. Paper thesauri(?) are fairly useless for this purpose. Word Menu is a little more useful, but limited and slow, as I'm quicker with a mouse than paper.

Are there any tools that work in that wander and get lost way, particularly with a lot of words? Is there some way to get the way-too-prolific results from thesaurus.com again?

posted by Gucky to Writing & Language (12 answers total)

Best answer: thesaurus.com seems to have changed how they serve search results

Tell me about it. They changed from a good licensed thesaurus to a crappy one. There was some discussion of this on Political Animal.

What happened to the original isn't clear. Supposedly the old one was attributed to "Roget's New Millennium Thesaurus", but that's published by Lexico -- the owner of Reference.com. There is no such listing in Worldcat. They also claim that "Roget's Classic Thesaurus" is being revised, but the only hits for that title are their own site.

This is a site that's been online since 1994 and worked perfectly until it was acquired last year, expensively, by Answers.com. Even when they added premium content in 2003 or so, the free stuff was still useful. So looks like they bought it and couldn't afford to use whatever customized licensed content they had.

All I can suggest is Google's similar sites.
posted by dhartung at 12:20 AM on April 29, 2008

Best answer: This will require an extra click or two, but appears to suit your stated purpose.
posted by dersins at 12:22 AM on April 29, 2008

In addition to the answers given already, I immediately thought of WordNet. It's not really a thesaurus, but it certainly makes it easy to wander through words.
posted by grouse at 2:57 AM on April 29, 2008 [2 favorites]

Not sure whether or not it suit your use, but do you already know about the super-cool visual thesaurus?
posted by daisyace at 5:54 AM on April 29, 2008

The Free Dictionary has a decent one or you can just look at a pretty good list of a lot of dictionaries and thesauri from OneLook.
posted by lubujackson at 6:56 AM on April 29, 2008

I don't know that there is an electronic edition, but you can get cheap used copies of the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus. You can read this sucker like a novel. There are long word entries from David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Simon Winchester, and the like as well as lengthy usage notes from the thesaurus editor (Erin McKean) and Bryan Garner. It looks like Oxford does have a couple of other thesauruses online, but you might have to go through your local library to see the subscriber version of the databases.
posted by mattbucher at 9:34 AM on April 29, 2008

You might like this. I know I do.
posted by JeffK at 10:28 AM on April 29, 2008

Response by poster: Thanks dhartung. It was driving me crazy. Glad to have it confirmed.

Looks like it's Bartleby and paper books for now.

Thanks, all.
posted by Gucky at 8:24 AM on April 30, 2008

Best answer: Received via email by someone who wasn't going to pay the $5, but I'll put it here for posterity: The fantastic verbose thesaurus at U Chicago.
posted by Gucky at 9:20 AM on May 1, 2008 [1 favorite]

If you like to wander, I recommend Visual Thesaurus, a site I have been using since the 90s to get completely lost int he beauty of words. It's useful and it's fun--and it shows you the context in which the words are related.
posted by seeminglee at 10:38 AM on May 1, 2008

Response by poster: I know everyone raves about visual thesaurus, but I have yet to find it very useful for what I want to do. It displays the interconnectivity (which is interesting) of common words and the navigation means that I have to be "into it" as opposed to taking notes with one hand and click/scroll with the other.

For writing, I might use it. For naming, not so much.
posted by Gucky at 5:29 PM on May 2, 2008

The fantastic verbose thesaurus at U Chicago.

Good find! Anyone know where to find a Firefox search plug-in for this one? (Searched the Mozilla site, but can't seem to find anything.)
posted by chefscotticus at 1:09 PM on July 28, 2008