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 for your writing needs as fast as possible. Here are the key differences between the 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 as a kind of thesaurus and conceptual exploration tool. The improvements in this update are targeted at this kind of usage. For these sorts of queries the system does a statistical analysis of text to find a broad range of related 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 are similar but not quite interchangeable: words like fiesta and carnival and extravaganza. Next time you write "glimmer of hope", consider some variants of a glimmer that really shimmer, words like modicum or spark. The most closely related concepts are listed first, so if you just want the conventional synonyms, you'll get those right 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 celebration is commonly described, such as annual or joyful or communal. Clicking on the "Verbs" tab will give you action words related to celebrations such as participate, planned, commemorate, etc. Searching for eat and then clicking "Adverbs" tells you 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 stronghold and so forth.

• There's improved accuracy for longer queries, too, like someone who makes barrels or a very common savoury white condiment often found on the dining table. As before, usually only the top result or top few results are correct for these kinds of queries. Our evaluation results show that the system shows a correct top result 15 to 20 percent more frequently than before for definition-style queries. (These can be particularly hard, and we expect to have some more improvements along these lines in the coming months!)

• Filters. You can apply filters to narrow down your results based on spelling, sound, and meaning. Click on "Show filters" after your search to reveal these options.

  • "Starts with" lets you narrow the results by alphabetic prefix, which is useful if you know the first letter or first few letters of what you're looking for. For example, if you want to explore words related to dog that start with the letters "sh", just search for dog and enter sh into the "Starts with" box to get results like schnauzer and sheltie and Shih Tzu.

    This and the "Number of letters" filter are also useful for crossword enthusiasts and other puzzlers. With these two filters, most users will not need to remember the wildcard patterns from OneLook, although that syntax continues to work in the new system.

  • "Rhymes with", "Sounds like", "Vowels like", "Stress pattern", and "Number of syllables": If you're a poet or songwriter or just interested in making 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 after searching 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 you dozens 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 might seek 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" yields forgotten, among others; searching for "place" and then doing a "Vowels like" filter on "dropped" yields spot. 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 particular metrical foot. You can describe the pattern by entering a sequence of 1s and 0s, where 1 represents a stressed syllable, and 0 an unstressed syllable. As an example, consider the many hundreds of words similar to surprising. Depending on your metrical needs, you might pick an iamb 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 creative writing. It allows you to rerank the results by conceptual similarity to some other concept. For example, suppose you want words that generally mean large but that are good for describing the ocean. If you search for large and then type ocean into the "Also related to" box, you'll get words like vast near the top. By contrast, if you enter table into the box, you'll get words like sizeable, which are more suitable than vast for describing furniture. If you want words for allegiance that are fine-tuned for the concept sports, this query will bring words like fandom and fanaticism to the top.

  The filters are applied to your results dynamically without taking you to a new web page, making it faster to explore a wide range of possibilities. The link in your browser's address bar updates to reflect your filters so that you can share your result lists with your colleagues and collaborators or save them for later.

• Quick definitions are shown in a panel on the same page when you click on a result, so that you don't lose your train of thought while exploring definitions. From these panels you can navigate to the full OneLook definitions page (the "Definitions" link), or to a follow-up query on the reverse dictionary ("Related"), or to another data source ("Wikipedia" and "Rhymes".) We'll be adding more content to these panels over time.

  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 very confident that it exactly matches the definition of a word, then that word's definition is shown (e.g., the definition of pandemic is shown for widespread epidemic.)

• The layout has been optimized for productivity on desktop and mobile devices, and the system is generally faster for exploration than before.
• The search box autocomplete function is smarter now; it shows you a list of completion guesses for the word you're typing (with spell-correction) if you're starting to do a single-word lookup, or a short 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 the result you're looking for. The autocomplete function now obeys all the regular OneLook 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 and several more as a verb. The results are not organized by sense, but instead listed in a column-oriented ordering ranked by overall relevance, with all of the different senses of a word mashed together. This is not optimal for highly polysemous words. 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 "part of speech" tabs ("Nouns", "Adjectives", etc.). Sometimes a word winds up in the wrong part-of-speech tab. The system guesses the part-of-speech of your query and of each of the results based on statistical data.
• Phonic filters: Four of the filters pertaining to how words are pronounced ("Sounds like", "Vowels like", "Stress pattern", and "Number of syllables") can only be used one at a time, and cannot be used in 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 see an error or two where a particularly rare word shows the wrong number of syllables. That's because the system doesn't know the pronunciation 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 appear highlighted in red, but they're not always recognized as such; sometimes a word that has a polar opposite meaning from your query will appear as a regular result on the list. If you're looking for antonyms, try searching 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.