What's new with the reverse dictionary / thesaurus?
The reverse dictionary is getting its first major upgrade in many years.Thank you for helping to test it out!
The overarching goal of the new system is to help you find the right word foryour writing needs as fast as possible. Here are the key differences betweenthe new tool (now available at https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/)and the old system:
More breadth and precision for single-concept queries.User feedback has taught us that most people use the OneLook reverse dictionary asa kind of thesaurus and conceptual exploration tool. The improvementsin this update are targeted at this kind of usage. Forthese sorts of queries the systemdoes a statistical analysis of text to find a broad range ofrelated words and phrases.
Consider a word such as celebration.A traditional thesaurus lists synonyms like festivity.OneLook's goal is to list these well-accepted synonyms and the many words that aresimilar but not quite interchangeable: words likefiesta and carnival and extravaganza. Next time you write "glimmer of hope", consider some variants of a glimmerthat really shimmer, words like modicum or spark.The most closely related conceptsare listed first, so if you just want the conventional synonyms, you'll get thoseright up front.
As before, you can restrict your results by part of speech using the tabs on the results screen. This feature is more useful than before for single-concept queries.Clicking on the "Adjectives" tab will give you ways that celebrationis commonly described, such as annual or joyful or communal.Clicking on the "Verbs" tab will give you action words related to celebrationssuch as participate, planned, commemorate, etc.Searching for eat and then clicking "Adverbs" tellsyou different ways that people eat, such as heartily and healthily and sparingly and gluttonously.Searching for fortified and then clicking on "Nouns"tells you things that are frequently fortified, like a camp and a castle and a strongholdand so forth.
- There's improved accuracy for longer queries,too, likesomeone who makes barrelsor a very common savoury white condiment often found on the dining table.As before, usually only the top result or top few results are correctfor these kinds of queries. Our evaluation results show that the system shows a correcttop result 15 to 20 percent more frequently than before fordefinition-style queries. (These can be particularly hard, and weexpect to have some more improvements along these lines in the comingmonths!)
Filters. You can apply filters to narrow down your results based onspelling, sound, and meaning. Click on "Show filters" after your search to reveal theseoptions.
"Starts with" lets you narrow the results by alphabetic prefix, whichis useful if you know the first letter or first few letters of whatyou're looking for. For example, if you want to explore words related todog that start with the letters "sh", just search for dogand enter sh into the "Starts with" box to get results likeschnauzer and sheltie and Shih Tzu.
This and the "Number of letters" filter are also usefulfor crossword enthusiasts and other puzzlers.With these two filters, most users willnot need to remember the wildcard patternsfrom OneLook, although that syntax continues to work in the new system.
- "Rhymes with", "Sounds like", "Vowels like", "Stress pattern", and "Number ofsyllables": If you're a poet or songwriter or just interested inmaking your musings more musical, try these phonic filters. If you're looking for words related to "dog" that rhyme with"park", you'd enter "park" into the "Rhymes with" filter aftersearching for "dog" and get back bark.Or if you need to squeeze a 1-syllable word related to "happiness" into a line of verse,the "Number of syllables" filter gives youdozens of choices.
The "Vowels like" filter restricts the results to words that are assonant (share a primary vowel sound) with some other word,a more agile alternative to rhyme.Consider a contrived example drawn from the beloved opening line of Hamilton.Suppose you'd like to enliven the phrase "dropped in a neglected place in the Carribean". You mightseek out alternatives for neglected and place that share the vowel sound in dropped.Searching for "neglected" and then doing a "Vowels like" filter on "dropped" yieldsforgotten, among others;searching for "place" and then doing a "Vowels like" filter on "dropped" yieldsspot. The assonance-rich line "dropped in some forgotten spot in the Carribean" sounds so much better!
The "Stress pattern" filter finds words that match a particularmetrical foot. You can describe the pattern by entering a sequence of 1s and 0s, where 1 representsa stressed syllable, and 0 an unstressed syllable.As an example, consider the many hundreds ofwords similar to surprising.Depending on your metrical needs, you might pick aniamb like bizarre (unstressed-stressed),a trochee like shocking (stressed-unstressed),a dactyl like puzzling (stressed-unstressed-unstressed),or even an amphibrach like amazing (unstressed-stressed-unstressed).
- The "Also related to" option is subtle but particularly useful for creativewriting. It allows you to rerank the results by conceptual similarity to someother concept. For example, suppose you want words that generally mean largebut that are good for describing the ocean. If you search for large and thentype ocean into the "Also related to" box, you'll get words likevast near the top.By contrast, if you enter table into the box, you'll get words likesizeable, which are moresuitable than vast for describing furniture.If you want words for allegiance that are fine-tuned for the concept sports,this query will bringwords like fandom and fanaticism to the top.
The filters are applied to your results dynamically without taking you to a new web page, making itfaster to explore a wide range of possibilities. The link in your browser's address bar updatesto reflect your filters so that you can share your result lists with your colleagues and collaboratorsor save them for later.
Quick definitions are shown in a panel on the same page when you click on a result, sothat you don't lose your train of thought while exploring definitions.From these panels you can navigate to the full OneLook definitionspage (the "Definitions" link), or to a follow-up query on thereverse dictionary ("Related"), or to another data source ("Wikipedia"and "Rhymes".) We'll be adding more content to these panels overtime.
If your query is a single word or a popular multi-word phrase,the definition for the query itself is shown at the top of the page.If your query is not a single word but the system is veryconfident that it exactly matches the definition of a word, then thatword's definition is shown (e.g., the definitionof pandemic is shownfor widespreadepidemic.)
- The layout has been optimized for productivity on desktop andmobile devices, and the system is generally fasterfor exploration than before.
- The search box autocomplete function is smarter now; it shows you alist of completion guesses for the word you're typing (withspell-correction) if you're starting to do a single-word lookup, or ashort list of reverse dictionary results if you've typed a multi-word query.Sometimes you won't even need to submit your query to find theresult you're looking for. The autocomplete function now obeys all the regularOneLook wildcard symbols.
Known bugs / problems and future work
- Sense disambiguation: Some words have many meanings,like "feed", which has several different definitions as a noun andseveral more as a verb. The results are not organized bysense, but instead listed in a column-oriented ordering rankedby overall relevance, with all of the different senses of a wordmashed together. This is not optimal for highly polysemouswords. An improved layout is in the works that organizes the results by sense.
- Parts of speech: By design, each result appears once in the default("All") tab of the results screen, and then again in one or more of the "partof speech" tabs ("Nouns", "Adjectives", etc.). Sometimes a word winds upin the wrong part-of-speech tab. The system guesses the part-of-speechof your query and of each of the results based on statisticaldata.
- Phonic filters: Four of the filters pertaining to how wordsare pronounced ("Sounds like", "Vowels like", "Stress pattern", and "Number ofsyllables") can only be used one at a time, and cannot be usedin combination with each other.When you set one of these filters, the system will clear out the others.
- If you use the "Number of syllables" filter regularly, you'll probably seean error or two where a particularly rare word shows the wrong numberof syllables. That's because the system doesn't know thepronunciation of every word and, when that happens, it guesses,sometimes incorrectly.
- There are occasional idiosyncrasies with Capitalization, for a similar reason,and with diacritic marks (like in cloisonné).
- Antonyms, which are related words in their own right, usually appearhighlighted in red, but they're not always recognized as such; sometimesa word that has a polar opposite meaning from your query will appearas a regular result on the list. If you're looking for antonyms, trysearching for "opposite of" followed by your word; it often works.
- If your query is an old-style OneLook wildcard pattern (like blue*),many of the filters (such as "Starts with", "Num letters", and several of the phonic filters) will be disabled.
