Word for Word

Tags:: dictionary,; education,; language,; Peter Mark Roget,; thesaurus,; words,; writing

Online thesauruses can go even further in bringing the interconnectedness of the English lexicon to life on the screen. The Visual Thesaurus (for which I serve as executive producer) creates interactive displays of the relationships between words and between senses of words. Moving through this type of semantic visualization, the jumps can be unexpected, allowing for the emergence of a different kind of serendipity than the kind that a print reference normally provides. The entire inventory of senses for a given word, with accompanying synonyms for each sense, can blossom forth like a flower on the screen. Such a visual efflorescence inspired George L. Dillon, a professor of English at the University of Washington, to write, “If indeed it is the case that we access all of the senses of words for a very brief interval when processing natural language, what wonderful things must be swimming about in our minds!”

Another significant effort in contemporary thesaurus-making admirably straddles the print/digital divide. The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary was conceived in 1965 at the University of Glasgow as a project that would index all the words in the OED, organizing them by their meanings and by their first known date of use. In 2009, at long last, HTOED was published in two massive volumes, the first providing a chronological listing of words in different conceptual classes and the second providing an index to find particular meanings of words in the book’s elaborate Roget-style hierarchy, from the abstract to the specific. While it is easy to get lost in its pages, HTOED clearly needed an online home to maximize its practicality for both casual and scholarly readers. Thus it was incorporated into the online OED in 2010, and there it truly thrives. Because the categories of words are presented chronologically, one can quickly see, for instance, how 149 terms for a “contemptible person” extend from “worm” and “wretch” in Old English to late-twentieth-century slang offerings like “scuzzbag” and “sleazeball.” For a writer, searching for just the right word can turn into an adventure in historical verisimilitude. A novelist or playwright seeking epithets for dialog set in the early seventeenth century can zero in on such terms as “viliaco” (1600), “snotty-nose” (1604), “sprat” (1605), “wormling” (1605), and “shag-rag” (1611).

What, then, should we expect a thesaurus to do for us? Simply allow us to replace one word with a near equivalent in a mechanical fashion? Such arid utilitarianism does little justice to the various ways that a thesaurus can shed light on language and encourage lexical explorations. A thesaurus, as we have seen, can mine rich usage data from textual corpora to paint a picture of how words are used in actual context. It can create new spatial metaphors for semantic connections. Or it can add a historical dimension to trace how words related to a given concept have ebbed and flowed over the centuries. These are but some of the directions that the twenty-first-century thesaurus is headed in, directions unforeseen by Roget in his time. Though we can be sure that he would have deplored the mindlessness of the word processor’s search-and-replace shortcuts, I feel equally confident that Roget would have appreciated the ways that new technologies can deepen our appreciation of the lexicon’s richness in all of its interwoven splendor.

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The thesaurus is invaluable to anyone writing formal verse. It allows the poet to sift through lists of words while seeking words with the right metrical qualities and nuance of meaning, as well as possibly rhyme.

Rhyming dictionaries are similarly helpful, and ideally should present all possible rhyming words - something software now makes possible.

Posted by Mike Cope on Thu 22 Mar 2012
Often when I write I'll feel a word vibrating at an extrememly low, inaudible frequency. Once I glance at it in a thesaurus the word will resonate and become obvious.

Posted by dave on Thu 22 Mar 2012
Ode to a Thesaurus
by Franklin P. Adams

O precious codex, volume, tome,
Book, writing, compilation, work
Attend the while I pen a pome,
A jest, a jape, a quip, a quirk.

For I would pen, engross, indite,
Transcribe, set forth, compose, address,
Record, submit--yea, even write
An ode, an elegy to bless--

To bless, set store by, celebrate,
Approve, esteem, endow with soul,
Commend, acclaim, appreciate,
Immortalize, laud, praise, extol.

Thy merit, goodness, value, worth,
Expedience, utility--
O manna, honey, salt of earth,
I sing, I chant, I worship thee!

How could I manage, live, exist,
Obtain, produce, be real, prevail,
Be present in the flesh, subsist,
Have place, become, breathe or inhale,

Without thy help, recruit, support,
Opitulation, furtherance,
Assistance, rescue, aid, resort,
Favor, sustention, and advance?

Alas! Alack! and well-a-day!
My case would then be dour and sad,
Likewise distressing, dismal, gray,
Pathetic, mournful, dreary, bad.

* * *

Though I could keep this up all day,
This lyric, elegiac, song,
Meseems hath come the time to say
Farewell! Adieu! Good-by! So long!

Posted by Tom Bell on Thu 22 Mar 2012
I echo Mike Cope's sentiments above. As a translator of medieval texts--including verse--the thesaurus is for me an invaluable tool in trying to match, as nearly as possible, the myriad qualities of a word in Latin or medieval German with a word (or words) in English.

Working recently on Hildegard of Bingen, for example, I struggled for some time to find a suitable phrasing for "sol et luna ipsis incouenienter ostendantur", a particularly striking way of describing the disordering cosmological impact of human sin. The phrase truly turns on the adverb "incouenienter" to express the way the sun and moon were acting against type, as it were: out of the ordinary, unusual, unpredictable, but all from the perspective of how they are supposed to function within the divinely ordered cosmos at whose pinnacle (and as whose microcosm) stands humanity. This is where rummaging through the thesaurus proved invaluable: "The sun and moon prove themselves intractable, for they do no follow their courses as set by God but exceed them."

Posted by Nathaniel Campbell on Thu 22 Mar 2012
I fear that these electronic thesaurus could stop invention of new words .IN old days people were used to improvise word for new things using their old vocabulary or from other languages .But as such list of synonym is available at click of mouse that attitude to create new words will die and new words added to language will dwindle day by day !
I mean to say there is disasters effect of containment of language !

Posted by NEELESH SALPE on Thu 22 Mar 2012
THE DOMAIN OF THESAURUS REX

Royally he treads the land,
The earth, the countryside,
The fields, the farms, the dirt, the sand.
He howls of these
Multiplicities
To flood, submerge, inundate
The febrile mind in words,
In terms, nouns, verbs to conjugate,
To tickle fancies into fantasies,
Shriek metaphors and similes,
Diddle with the functions
Of prepositions , exclamations,
Punctuations and conjunctions
Leaving us to flee in fear
From this assault upon the ear,
Overwhelmed by lexicography
Seeking pure cognography

Posted by Jan Sand on Fri 23 Mar 2012
Thesauri don't kill prose and poetry. People kill prose and poetry.

Posted by Kevin Maloney on Fri 23 Mar 2012
I never go to the thesaurus looking for blank inspiration. I go to the thesaurus when I know there's a word meaning exactly what I want it to mean, but I can't quite bring it to mind.

Posted by Kevin W. Parker on Fri 23 Mar 2012
Kevin W. Parker stole my thunder, but I'll pitch in a me too, for what it's worth.

Posted by jhm on Sat 24 Mar 2012
I third Kevin Parker. I've always used the Thesaurus to chase down particular words I can't quite retrieve, and more and more as I get older. I have no doubt that finding the word I'm looking instead of settling for second choice improves my writing.

I just had to refresh Captcha about 30 times before I got one I could read. Do others have this problem?

Posted by Denise on Thu 29 Mar 2012
On the subject of thesauri, let me vent about the scarcity of Roget's category-based books these days. Almost all available thesauri today are the pallid "dictionary" kind: greatly inferior to the category-based ones, but eating up all the shelf space at bookstores like McDonald's driving better restaurants into bankruptcy. Even books with "Roget" in the title are now mostly dictionary style; my 1977 Roget's is getting ragged from overuse, but I haven't managed to find a suitable replacement.

Posted by Jim Gardner on Sat 31 Mar 2012
Fun article.

Mike Cope and Nathaniel Campbell are correct. In my case, I rarely use a thesaurus when writing, but I use one constantly when translating.

Writers of formal verse, of course, need lines to scan, and writers of free verse still need the poem to sound good. Compromises are necessary. That's one reason why verse is not an appropriate medium for scholarship, journalism, law, and how-to-books.

Posted by Kent Richmond on Fri 6 Apr 2012