Wordnik Announces New Smarter Online Thesaurus

OMG, this is a wordnerd's wet dream come true. I am a wordnerd -- I admit it -- and I have been known to spend countless hours on Dictionary.com, but this is the best online thesaurus I have seen. It allows for true contextual comparisons. It's so important to use the right word: simple or complex, it has to be the right word. I am an advocate of: Say what you mean and mean what you say. In fiction, clarity is so important. As for the technical bits, the pages load quickly and each section is set off nicely. It even includes my favorite: an Etymology section.

From the press release:

Wordnik, the online dictionary and language resource, today launched a new, smarter online thesaurus that shows related words in context to help writers find the right word quickly and accurately.

Traditional online thesauruses show related words, but ignore context. They don’t tell you that people like brownies that are moist but not brownies that are damp, or that it doesn’t make sense to moisten your enthusiasm.

Wordnik’s thesaurus lets you see words in real-world sentences drawn from a vast and constantly updated collection of texts. Whether a word was coined by Shakespeare or Sarah Palin, you’ll find high-quality sentences to help you understand how that word is used by others, and how to use it correctly yourself.

Wordnik is also the first online thesaurus to let you compare words side-by-side. Want a more nuanced understanding of ‘vacant’ vs. ‘void’? Viewing their definitions and example sentences next to each other reveals that they’re not interchangeable …

You can find the Wordnik Thesaurus here.