Enter a word, phrase, description, or pattern above to find synonyms, related words, and more.
Concept clusters in the subject Negative qualities (Top)
Abandonment or desolation Ability or skill Absence of clothing Accusing Acting childishly Adhering to rules Aggression or attack Aggressive behavior or actions Amazement or astonishment Amazement or wonder Anger or hostility Anger or rage Anxiety or nervousness Anxiety or worry Appetite or desire for food Arrogance Atonement Attraction or seduction Authoritarianism or dominance Awe or amazement Barbarism Beauty Behaving foolishly Belittling Big or Large Boisterousness or rowdiness Boldness or audacity Boldness or audacity (2) Boldness or fearlessness Bother or nuisance Bothering or pestering someone Brutality or extreme violence Calmness or tranquility Casting spells or enchantment Cataclysm Causing annoyance Causing harm or damage Causing harm or destruction Character or disposition Characterizing Clumsiness Clumsiness or awkwardness Clumsiness or lack of skill Coercion Comfort and consolation Compassion or sympathy Condemnation or blaming Confused Confusion or being confused Consistent or repeated failure Corruption Corruption or betrayal Cowardice or lack of bravery Criticism (2) Crying or shedding tears Culpability Cursing or expressing ill will Cutting or piercing Daintiness Danger or harm Darkness or gloominess Deadpan humor Death Deception or dishonesty Deception or dishonesty (2) Defilement or contamination Delight Depravity or moral corruption Depression Describing Desolation or gloominess Despair or misfortune Destruction or deterioration Detail or intricacy Deterioration (2) Difficulty Difficulty or hardship Disapproval Disapproval or criticism Disapproval or criticism (2) Dishonor or lack of integrity Dislike or contempt Distracting Disturbance Doom or impending disaster Dormancy or inactivity Dramatics Emaciation Embarrassment or humiliation Emotional heart Emotional pain or distress Enemy or Adversary Engaging Envy and jealousy Error or mistake Error or mistake (2) Evil or malevolence Exceeding Exceeding the necessary Excessive stress or anxiety Expansion or inflation Exploitation Expressing displeasure Extravagance or Showiness Extravagant luxury Extreme anger or rage Extreme enthusiasm or energy Extreme or violent anger Eye-catching Falling asleep or being asleep Falsification Fatigue or tiredness Fear or scaring someone Fear or shock Feeling sick Feeling unwell or unhealthy Firmness or strictness Flattery or insincere praise Fraud or trickery Furious Gentleness or softness Gigantic or colossal size Gloom Good luck or favorable fortune Grandeur Grandeur or greatness Grandness or magnificence Greed Grieving Grouch Guilt Harm or threat Harsh or abusive criticism Heroism and valor Horror or disgust Hostility or aggression Hot-tempered Hunger or starvation Hypersexuality or excessive sexual desire Hypocrisy Illegality or immorality Illegitimacy or dishonor Imitation or Counterfeit Impishness or roguishness Infatuation Infectious diseases Infliction or harm Insanity or mental instability Insanity or mental instability (2) Insufficiency or deficiency Insults Intelligence or cleverness Intense desire or passion Intense dislike or hatred Intense love or enthusiasm Intense or extreme anger Intensity (2) Ish as an approximate suffix Joy or happiness Lack of excitement or interest Large or size Large quantity or abundance Larger clothing sizes Law violation Laziness or lack of energy Lightness or lack of color Liveliness or vitality Loneliness or isolation Long-suffering or endurance Losing consciousness Luck or fortune Lying Majesty or splendor Making a mistake or error Making jokes or being funny Making mistakes or errors Malicious behavior or actions Menacing Mental disorders Mercy or compassion Messiness or carelessness Messiness or sloppiness Meticulous attention to detail Meticulousness or intricacy Misconception Misconception (2) Misconduct or injustice Mismanagement Misplacement or disorder Misrepresentation Misunderstanding Mixing or jumbling things up Moral or physical decay Moral or physical repugnance Motion sickness Mourning Moving at a slow speed Nausea or feeling sick Nitpicking Nudity Obesity (2) Obscenity or profanity Overblown speech or language Overdoing or underdoing Overexcitement Overleveraging in finance Overly meticulous or fussy Overly sentimental or sweet Overweight and obesity Overwhelmed Overwhelmed with emotion Perversion or deviant behavior Petty or trivial disputes Physical or mental impairment Physical weakness or frailty Pleasant personality traits Poverty or being poor Pretentiousness Pride or arrogance Producing or inducing tears Prudery Punishment or discipline Quirkiness or oddity Radiating or glowing brightly Ranting Regulating Relief Reproach or rebuke Repulsion or distaste Retaliation or revenge Retribution or revenge Roughness Sarcasm or mockery Scandal and defamation Scarcity or insufficiency Scared or frightened Secrecy Seducing Senility Shaking or trembling Shame or contempt Shape or form (3) Shock Shoddy work Sleep or drowsiness Slowness or lack of speed Small or short in size Smallness or Tiny Size Smallness or extreme smallness Smallness or insignificance Smoothness Smoothness (2) Smoothness or sleekness Snark Soberness or sobriety Social and political awareness Someone's face Sparkling Speed or quickness Spending and saving money Splendor or magnificence Staffing levels Stealth or sneakiness Stinginess or frugality Stingy Stress Strong or distinctive taste Subtlety Surprise Sycophancy Taking risks or daring actions Terrible or horrifying Thickness or being thick Thinness or slimness Tragedy Traitor or treason Traits or attributes Trembling or shaking Triviality Unpalatable Unpleasant or offensive odors Untruthfulness Ups and downs Usury Vandalism Verbosity or loquaciousness Victimhood Villain Weakness or fragility Weakness or lack of strength Weakness or lack of strength (2) Weight or heaviness Well-dressed Worst or negative outcomes Wrinkling or crumbling Wrongdoing or evil behavior Wrongdoing or misconduct


This subject index is an experimental OneLook feature. We've grouped words and phrases into thousands of clusters based on a statistical analysis of how they are used in writing. Some of the words and concepts may be vulgar or offensive. The names of the clusters were written automatically and may not precisely describe every word within them.

How do I use OneLook's thesaurus / reverse dictionary?

OneLook helps you find words for any type of writing. Similar to a traditional thesaurus, it find synonyms and antonyms, but it offers much greater depth and flexibility. Simply enter a single word, a few words, or even a whole sentence to describe what you need. Press Enter or choose from the autocomplete suggestions to explore related words. You can sort, filter, and explore the words that come back in a variety of creative ways. Here's a video which goes over some of the basics.

What are some examples?

Task
Example searches
🔆 Find a word by describing it barrel maker
before the flood
museum guide
search for food
urge to travel
what a milliner makes
tried twice for the same crime
when cancer spreads through the body
🔆 Explore synonyms and related concepts fancy
baseball
clouds
twisty
push
industrial revolution
🔆 Get a list of words in some category ("type of...") type of bird of prey
type of soft cheese
type of light bulb
🔆 Find more words similar to some examples (comma-separated list) squishy,spongy,gooey
bicycle,motorcycle,scooter
ice cream,pie,cookies
🔆 Answer basic identification questions capital of Vietnam
longest river in the world
original host of Jeopardy
🔆 Solve crossword puzzle clues, or find words if you only know some of the letters.
(Use pattern:description syntax) 		??lon:synthetic fabric
s?nt?:christmas
l*ch*:fruit
??????:hit
c*:board game

Exploring the results

Click on any result to see definitions and usage examples tailored to your search, as well as links to follow-up searches and additional usage information when available. OneLook knows about more than 2 million different words and expressions covering every topic under the sun. Try exploring a favorite topic for a while and you'll be surprised how much new stuff there is to learn!

Ordering the results

Your results will initially appear with the most closely related word shown first, the second-most closely shown second, and so on. You can re-order the results in a variety of different ways, including alphabetically, by length, by popularity, by modernness, by formality, and by other aspects of style. Click the box that says "Closest meaning first..." to see them all. (Here's a short video about sorting and filtering with OneLook Thesaurus.)

Filtering the results

You can refine your search by clicking on the "Advanced filters" button on the results page. This lets you narrow down your results to match a certain starting letter, number of letters, number of syllables, related concept, meter, vowel sound, or number of syllables. Read more details on filters if you're interested in how they work.

I'm only looking for synonyms! What's with all of these weird results?

For some kinds of searches only the first result or the first few results are truly synonyms or good substitutions for your search word. We highlight these results in yellow. Beyond that, the results are meant to inspire you to consider similar words and adjacent concepts. Not all of the results will make sense at first, but they're all connected with your search in some way. We'd rather give you too many options than too few. If you're unsure of a word, we urge you to click on it to check its definitions and usage examples before using it in your Oscars acceptance speech or honors thesis.

What are letter patterns?

If you know some letters in the word you're looking for, you can enter a pattern instead of, or in addition to, a description. Here are how patterns work:
  • The asterisk (*) matches any number of letters. That means that you can use it as a placeholder for any part of a word or phrase. For example, if you enter blueb* you'll get all the terms that start with "blueb"; if you enter *bird you'll get all the terms that end with "bird"; if you enter *lueb* you'll get all the terms that contain the sequence "lueb", and so forth. An asterisk can match zero letters, too.

  • The question mark (?) matches exactly one letter. That means that you can use it as a placeholder for a single letter or symbol. The query l?b?n?n,  for example, will find the word "Lebanon".

  • The number-sign (#) matches any English consonant. For example, the query tra#t finds the word "tract" but not "trait".

  • The at-sign (@) matches any English vowel (including "y"). For example, the query abo@t finds the word "about" but not "abort".

  • NEW! The comma (,) lets you combine multiple patterns into one. For example, the query ?????,*y* finds 5-letter words that contain a "y" somewhere, such as "happy" and "rhyme".

  • NEW! Use double-slashes (//) before a group of letters to unscramble them (that is, find anagrams.) For example, the query //soulbeat will find "absolute" and "bales out", and re//teeprsn will find "represent" and "repenters". You can use another double-slash to end the group and put letters you're sure of to the right of it. For example, the query //blabrcs//e will find "scrabble". Question marks can signify unknown letters as usual; for example, //we??? returns 5-letter words that contain a W and an E, such as "water" and "awake".

  • NEW! A minus sign (-) followed by some letters at the end of a pattern means "exclude these letters". For example, the query sp???-ei finds 5-letter words that start with "sp" but do not contain an "e"or an "i", such as "spoon" and "spray".

  • NEW! A plus sign (+) followed by some letters at the end of a pattern means "restrict to these letters". For example, the query *+ban finds "banana".

  • On OneLook's main search or directly on OneLook Thesaurus, you can combine patterns and thesaurus lookups by putting a colon (:) after a pattern and then typing a description of the word, as in ??lon:synthetic fabric and the other examples above.

Other ways to access this service:

Is this available in any language other than English?

The same interface is now available in Spanish at OneLook Tesauro as a beta version. More languages are coming!

How does it work?

We use a souped-up version of our own Datamuse API, which in turn uses several lingustic resources described in the "Data sources" section on that page. The definitions come from Wiktionary, Wikipedia, and WordNet. Here are some known problems with the current system.
Much gratitude to Gultchin et al for the algorithm behind the "Most funny-sounding" sort order.

Profanity and problematic word associations

If you're using this site with children, be forewarned you'll occasionally find profanity and other vulgar expressions. (The site aims to show you how words have been used in the language, including good ones and bad ones. Removing hurtful words would be a disservice to everyone!)

Some of the thesaurus results come from a statistical analysis of the words in a large collection of books written in the past two centuries. A handful of times we've found that this analysis can lead us to suggest word associations that reflect racist or harmful stereotypes present in this source material. If you see one of these, please know that we do not endorse what the word association might imply. In egregious cases we will remove it from the site if you report it to us via the feedback link below.

Privacy

No personally identifying information is ever collected on this site or by any add-ons or apps associated with OneLook. OneLook Thesaurus sends your search query securely to the Datamuse API, which keeps a log file of the queries made to the service in the last 24 hours. The log file is deleted after 24 hours and we do not retain any long-term information about your IP address or invididual queries.

Who's behind this site and where can I send my comments and complaints feedback?

OneLook is a service of Datamuse. You can send us feedback here.

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