Free Thesaurus offers many valuable features found in Word Hippo and listed in the blog Thesauruses Aren’t Created Equal—Overview. In addition, it has features that suggest a writer should also have this resource in the desktop bookmark tab.
Free Thesaurus contains more than 145,800 unique entries from three top sources: Collins Thesaurus of the English Language—Complete and Unabridged, The American Heritage Roget’s Thesaurus, and WordNet. The Free Thesaurus shares a site with The Free Dictionary to provide a comprehensive online thesaurus of synonyms, antonyms, and related words plus a dictionary definition in every verb and noun form. As in the Hippo application, this website supports all genres except poetry, includes contextual and parts of speech subdivisions, and accepts single words and word groups.
Features not found in Word Hippo include:
- A unique graphic display shows the relationship between synonyms and antonyms.
- Tabs for three professional dictionaries, Acronyms, Idioms, Encyclopedia, and Wikipedia give easy access to many searches not supported in other web applications.
Register for the free version, then click on the active link to Free Thesaurus to open the application as you continue reading the post and exploring the options the software provides.
The following image shows the search options available on Free Thesaurus and the graphic view of the synonyms results for Charge in the search bar.
Select the Thesaurus tab, type in the word Charge in the search bar, and click the green right arrow button to display synonyms. The spider diagram in the above figure appears. Charge is in the center. Boxes one level out (i.e., Attack) have the context words. The synonyms (round green) and antonyms (square red) for that context branch out from there. Study the spider diagram. A click on any word in the diagram triggers a fresh spider diagram with the new word at the center. Scan through the similar words in several contextual categories. Note the options available with a right click of the green right arrow button.
Scroll down below the spider diagram to see a more extensive list of word choices with contextual group names in the left-hand column. Click the blue down arrow to expand the list into synonyms and antonyms. Note, not all words have antonym choices. The figure below describes the operation of the listing for the word Charge.
Expand and review other verb and noun replacements for Charge.
Scroll to the bottom of the web page to the section References in Classic Literature. The figure below shows a section of the listing. Each listing is a different published work. Click on the View in context link to see the full text and the name of the work and author. An Edit—Find search in the browser display highlights the word’s location in the text.
Select the Dictionary tab with the word Charge in the search bar to see a comprehensive listing of definitions for a word in two parts of speech—verb and noun. Verb definitions start with the transitive category, then the intransitive usage follows. While there are nine types of nouns (common, proper, concrete, abstract, collective, countable, uncountable, singular, and plural), the dictionary doesn’t address that distinction. Idiom examples follow that include the word Charge follow the definitions. Select the Idioms tab with Charge in the search bar to display and understand this feature. Check idioms for other words. Most online thesauruses/dictionaries don’t offer this resource.
After the definition section, contextual definitions and sample sentences extracted from six different cited sources provide an in-depth look at the word’s usage. This level of detail isn’t found in most online dictionaries.
The last section in the Dictionary tab provides a complete listing of the search word in every tense used in English. The following figure illustrates how this feature works.
Select other tenses to learn the operation of this feature.
Explore the operation of the other tabs at the top of this application using the sample word Charge. Enter a known acronym (i.e., USPS) and select the Acronym tab to see the results.
A bookmarks tab on the desktop with Word Hippo and Free Thesaurus URLs will give you a host of great replacement words at the click of the mouse.
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