A visual thesaurus creates a graphic representation of the word you are looking for in relation to other synonyms, which is precisely what the free online service does: enter your desired word and it will be displayed in the middle of the screen surrounded by various synonyms. Mouse over the round ‘nodes’ that separate your word from others, and a tooltip will appear to explain the general meaning relative to that particular branch of synonyms.
More info on this tool:
- Graph Words is powered by WordNet, a “lexical database for English” out of Princeton University.
- You can save results as images in PNG format for later reference.
Wish list:
- I wish there was more information as to what the different colored nodes meant (e.g. blue or green vs. the default orange).
That’s it. A nice little tool if you need it.
Visit Graph Words.
Here’s another one of the same type that’s arguably better (at least IMHO)
http://www.visuwords.com/
@ Wordy: it does seem quite slick. Thanks for the tip.
Looks like the colors may represent different parts of speech: nouns – blue, verbs – green, adjectives – orange
Looks like the colors may represent different parts of speech: nouns – blue, verbs – green, adjectives – orange. Interestingly, the app doesn’t seem to know about adverbs.