Ask HN: How do you search for an appropriate English word? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you search for an appropriate English word?

35 pointssharmi55 comments

Consider that you are writing a blog post or an essay. No one will have all the words we need at the tip of the tongue at all times. So when you struggle to find the appropriate word, what resource do you use to find the appropriate word? There are more than one ways to find a specific word. One is where we know a related word and look for its synonym/antonym. For example the word 'beautiful' is so overused, you would like to use a synonymous word which is more exact. The other is finding a related word where we know the surrounding context and try to use the appropriate word for that context. For example "a ________ pupil" you might want to describe a person who is a perfect pupil disciplined and intelligent. So how do you go about this type of search?

Do most of your search fall into 'synonymous' type or 'related words' type?

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http://english.stackexchange.com/

Also Google define:test will give synonyms for test

E.g.

test1 test/Submit noun noun: test; plural noun: tests 1. a procedure intended to establish the quality, performance, or reliability of something, especially before it is taken into widespread use. "no sparking was visible during the tests" synonyms: trial, experiment, test case, case study, pilot study, trial run, tryout, dry run; More

I think you might want to look at a thesaurus.

http://www.thesaurus.com/

+1. That's what I do. I have a shortcut search so that I can simply type t <word> any time I need an alternative word.

It's not only useful for prose by the way. I sometimes use it to find the most appropriate name for a variable, function, API entry point, or for a small project.

If you use DuckDuckGo as your primary search engine, you can use a bang[1] !t [word]...kind of a default shortcut

1. https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Most innovative service I know: http://www.netspeak.org. It does exactly what the article talks about: offering a word by filling a hole in a sentence or phrase.

That was most useful! Thank you very much.

How often do you use it? Do you find it useful for your purpose?

If you know the word and you're looking for synonyms, use a thesaurus.[1]

If you know the general idea and want a more precise word to describe it, I'd look into WordNet, especially concepts like hyponyms (subsets of a general word, car -> ambulance) and troponyms (different ways of performing the word, useful for verbs, e.g. eat -> slurp, gobble, peck).[2]

If you know the context and you want a word that "sounds good" in that context, use a collocations dictionary.[3]

[1] http://www.thesaurus.com/ [2] http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn [3] http://www.ozdic.com/collocation-dictionary/pupil

ozdic is something new for me. Thanks!

I find if I'm struggling to come up with a word it's because I've lost the conversational flow of the sentence I'm writing, or of the point I'm trying to make. If I try to describe it out loud to an imaginary or, ideally, a real person, I'm usually then able to convey what I was trying to say, though usually by restructuring the form of the argument, rather than by conveniently finding the right word.

Often complex thoughts come to me not as fully constructed sentences. I might forget how I intended to finish a sentence by the time I'm three words in, lost in a forest of opportunities for converting the faint cognitive signal to an established element of prose.

I find I am better able to articulate a problem after I've explained it to a number of people on different occasions. The first person I explain it to won't have the foggiest what I'm talking about, probably because I'm constantly grasping for words, but to the fifth person the problem will seem trivial.

If I can't get a suggestion from DuckDuckGo or Google's instant answers, lately I've been going to Wiktionary. Surprisingly comprehensive, given I thought it was a neglected Wikipedia spinoff.

On a side note, Wiktionary would be 10x as useful if it was structured somehow, rather than being strictly formatted text.

I always use spotlight search on mac [CMD+SPACE], which returns a dictionary result in the list of options from what you type.

From there, I open the dictionary app and check the thesaurus.

I seldom need any other sources that what is already on my Mac :)

I use a couple of thesaurus apps I have on my phone. If I'm in a hurry, I just google "[word] thesaurus".

Wordnik (https://www.wordnik.com/) is also a good resource to check how a word is used. Note that I'm not a native English speaker, hence these resources are super useful for me.

Not sure if this is what yo are looking for, but as a non native speaker, when I am not sure which word is appropriate in given context I will search the whole phrase. If it appears on obscure message boards then it is probably not what I the right word in the context, if it appears in ft.com then it is good to go. The quotation marks in the search are essential.

Google books ngram counts are a slightly more precise way to do this. But yeah --- this is my standard way to explain to non-native speakers what works and what doesn't :)

I had this problem when I was trying to figure out good domain names. It's one of the reasons I ended up building this side project. It shows synonyms, but also related words, other types of that words, words that rhyme, derivatives, etc.

https://www.wordsapi.com

This is a problem I would like to see solved. I'm very often in situation where I have a word on my tongue but can't remember exactly what it is. I usually end up googling but sometimes it's not enough. It's hard to google on abstract things like this.

I use TheFreeDictionary a lot. Just type "tfd.com/<word>" and it gives you multiple definitions from different dictionaries. Example: http://tfd.com/intelligent

OneLook Reverse Dictionary [1]. I use it all the time and it's helped me with coming up with domain names.

[1]: http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml

OSX's dictionary is quite awesome actually. I use that mostly and might also use Google.

I use this almost daily when I name a variable or function. It's useful to look for a more precise noun or verb, or see if they have other connotations.

It is kind of interesting that people actually need to look for synonymous words, because if you have one word that describes what you want to express, why do you need another word for it?

Well, it seems that when writing English prose, it is considered bad style to use the same word more than once in a paragraph, and the offense becomes greater when using the word more often. This "rule" is, from a logical standpoint, of course complete nonsense, but nevertheless it exists.

So, this makes me wonder, can't we write a program that automatically "synonymizes" a text, and thus fixes any problems with this style rule?

> So, this makes me wonder, can't we write a program that automatically "synonymizes" a text, and thus fixes any problems with this style rule?

Write this then run some well know writing through it, and put it in a blog.

The absurdist prose that results would be amazing.

This rule is not constrained only to english, it happens to exist in french too (and probably other languages).

Also, reading well written texts is supposed to expand your vocabulary and understanding of the language. How's thats suppose to work is someone is hammering the same words over and over again?

"It is kind of interesting that people actually need to look for synonymous words, because if you have one word that describes what you want to express, why do you need another word for it?"

Perhaps there's a word which more elegantly and accurately conveys your meaning, but which isn't on the tip of your tongue.

I don't think this once per paragraph rule is much of a rule. It might be a useful for adjectives and adverbs but that is it.

PS synonymous words = synonyms

Because the words aren't exactly synonymous, and different words have subtly different meanings.

It's not so much a hard rule as a "lint" warning for your language. If you're reusing the same adjective, either you're failing to distinguish between things or you should just delete subsequent uses of the adjective. For nouns, consider using "it".

Doing the opposite correctly is a powerful rhetorical technique: "by the people, of the people, and for the people".

You don't think that over using the same word in close proximity jars and just looks clunky.

I usually use thesaurus.com and oxforddictionaries.com

If that doesn't do it I check quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-girl and english.stackexchange.com and maybe books.google.com/ngrams to find out what's commonly used ...

grammar-girl is an informative resource and I can forsee myself spending hours :). How do you use the ngrams?

The ngram viewer is a great way to figure out what phrases people commonly use. "Make sure" vs. "ensure" is a good example, I guess. I would have though "make sure" is more common, but apparently not: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=make+sure%2Cen...

Wordnet: Let you go up/down the hierarchy and to siblings.

http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=cosmos

I google for "define:word" to check for spelling, but a thesaurus is usually available in the drop down menu. Then I search words with similar meaning to find the word on the tip of my tongue.

For a non-native English speaker, like myself, it's easy to just use a translator app or website to come up with synonyms to a word I'm looking for.

As an interesting sidenote, the more I use English everyday the more I find the myself doing the opposite. Struggling to figure out a proper translation in my native language to an English word.

My vote goes to http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ or http://www.tfd.com/ for short. Check out the http://www.tfd.com/beautiful example

It is very comprehensive but don't you feel like there is too much going on there? Like there are two many sources? Would you think if it is restricted to only a few choice sources, it would be less cluttered? Or do the different definitions give more clarity?

That's precisely why I like it ;) Tfd seems to aggregate many dictionaries. It's quite helpful with some specific fields like medicine.

I usually use www.thesaurus.com/browse/word

99% of the time I type "[word] thesaurus" into Google. One of the many sites people are recommending here tends to come up top.

For an essay, I use a paper thesaurus. (I do my first drafts longhand - I just think better that way.)

For something like an HN comment, I just use the word that comes to mind. If I'm not happy with it, I use whatever word seems best after 30 seconds to two minutes of thought. I'm not really concerned with "the perfect word" in this context.

quite obvious but i do use this a lot: http://thesaurus.com

You can always ask someone you know how would they say it. Works most of the times when Google isn't there for me.

I use Google Translate. If you translate single words from one language to another you get a list with possible meanings, neatly grouped together to derive some context for the meaning along with it.

Since most of the time I am looking for a word I have something in mind in my native language, or vice versa, that usually works for me.

When writing in MS Word the synonym suggestions from the right click context menu are pretty good and I like that it doesn't require a change in tab/window. Chrome has at least one extension that provides the same functionality but I haven't tried it so I can't say if the suggestions are any good.

http://dico.isc.cnrs.fr/dico/en/search

I use this for both English and French synonyms. Fast, light and all words are hyperlinked. It does not provide definitions but uses scientific methods to establish synonyms.

I'll go to a translate tool, enter the word in my native language, and look at all the possible translations

I sometimes start typing a part of the sentence in Google Search and see what comes up in the auto-complete.

English is my second language so I need this often. I either use wiktionary, or google translate. In translated text you can click the word to get alternate translations that will point you in the right direction.

i've gotten results by searching with many words to describe my intention into google

basically type the definition of the word you want, and google can find the actual word you're looking for.

I use http://visualthesaurus.com. It provides a graph interface for related words and synonyms.

Pretty much yeah, I look for common synonyms and related words.

http://www.stardict.org I use stardict.

wordhippo.com has related words, other forms, opposite meanings and rhymes.. It's quite cool.

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