Enter a word, phrase, description, or pattern above to find synonyms, related words, and more.
Concept clusters in the subject Physical processes (Top)
Abrasion or friction Acidity Acidity (2) Addiction Aeration Aging or maturation Animal hunting or processing Autumn or fall season Bad smell or odor (2) Baldness on the human head Becoming more solid or rigid Black or darkness Bleaching or whitening Blood Blood or bloodshed Bloodshed Body handling or body disposal Body structure or anatomy Bodybuilding and muscle growth Boiling or cooking with heat Breathing Breathing exercises Breathing out or expelling air Brightness or shining Brutal or violent killing Bulging or protruding Burial or interment Burning (2) Burning or burn Burning or fire Burns or burning Calcination Chemical Engineering Chewing Cleaning Cloudology Clustering Cold weather slang Coldness or low temperature Combining metals Composting and Fertilization Concrete or cementation Construction process Contamination Cooking or heating Cooling Corpse Corrosion Cutting or slicing (2) Damage or destruction Darkness Death care industry Decay or deterioration Decorating or embellishing Defect or fault Deodorizing Depletion or exhaustion Depletion or reduction Destruction or elimination Devouring Dieting Digging or unearthing Dilation or dilatation Dirtiness Dirty or covered in mud Dirtying or Soiling Dissolving or dispersion Distillation Diving or submerging Drainage or removing liquid Drawing or sketching Drop Drying Dryness or lack of moisture Dunking Dust Eating or consuming Eating or food consumption Effervescence or frothiness Elimination or eradication Enhancement or improvement Evaporation and condensation Excretion Expansion or enlargement Expansion or swelling Expelling or ejecting Explosion or Bursting Extreme heat or hot weather Extreme or intense coldness Eye Eye anatomy Eye expressions or behaviors Eyes or eye characteristics Falling or descending Feeding or providing food Filtration Fire or combustion Fluid movement or release Fog or mist Food Additives and Agents Food preparation Foolproofing Formation or presence of ice Freezing or coldness Freezing or solidification Fumigation Glossiness or shininess Grafting Growth or development Having holes or openings Heating up Heavy rain Height or elevation Hot or heat Illumination or glowing Image and sound processing Improvement or refinement Improving appearance Increasing in size or volume Indentations Inspiration or motivation Intense or blazing fire Intensifying Liquid flow Liquidity or fluid dynamics Maiming or mutilation Marshes or swamps Mass murder Medical examination Melting or liquefaction Metallurgy or metal processing Molding or shaping materials Muscular strength and physique Mustiness or staleness Neck feature Neglect or disrepair Nerves or nervous system Numbness or loss of sensation Obesity Obscuring Obstruction (2) Ocular anomalies Outline or contour Overeating or gluttony Parasitism or harmful invasion Partial Transparency Patching or mending Peeling Permeation Petrifying Physical damage or pain Pointed sharpness Pointillism or dot art Poisoning Polishing Processing equipment Proofing Protection or resistance Protruding or large belly Purification (2) Purification or cleansing Rainfall Reducing in size or quantity Reducing or decreasing in size Refreshing or rejuvenating Removal or cleaning Removal or cleaning processes Removal or cleansing Removal or elimination (2) Removal or elimination (3) Removal or purification Removing moisture or drying Removing parts from an animal Respiratory therapy Rot Sailing or seafaring Saliva or drooling Savoring and enjoying food Scattering Sealing or containment Setting Something on Fire Shadow or shade Shadow or shade (2) Simplification or reduction Skin injuries or wounds Skinny dipping Slaughtering animals for food Small pieces or fragments Smell or odor Smell or scent Sourness or acidity Spit or mucus Splashing or spilling liquid Spots or markings Spraying or scattering liquid Spreading or applying Spreading or expanding Spreading out Sprinkling Starting a fire Steroid-enhanced bodybuilding Stickiness or viscosity (2) Stinging or Painful Sensation Stress or tension Suffering from heatstroke Sun exposure Sun exposure (2) Sunlight or warmth Sweating Sweating or perspiration Synonyms Synonyms (2) Temperature Control Texture Thin edges or boundaries Tincturing Underlying Uninhabited or abandoned areas Using up or expenditure Vapour or gas Venomousness Waste expulsion Water falling or dripping Watering crops Weed control or removal Weight Gain Wet or humid Wet or soaked Wetness or moisture Wind or winding Wiping Withering or wilting Worn-out


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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