VISUAL THESAURUS

This application began life as a web-based tool in 1998. Since then, Plumb Design (www.visualthesaurus.com) updated it, and released it as a stand alone product earlier this year. Visual Thesaurus, as its name indicates, provides you with a graphical way to find words, their meanings, and their synonyms. It uses the WordNet database provided by the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton University (www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/). It handles English language words only.

It is, if nothing else, a unique approach to looking up words. While moving over to another program in order to look up a word is less than ideal, having to move over to this program may make it not quite so hard to deal with. Can you find the synonym to that word to need to make deadline? Sure, although because of the graphical nature of the presentation, it may be more difficult than usual to find exactly what you are looking for. That doesn't necessarily seem to be the point of this program, however. I found myself just exploring related links to words that jumped out at me. It became a fun sort of game to follow along a random selection path to find out what would pop up next.

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