Consider the thesaurus
The thesaurus sucks. It's flat. Everything connects to everything (the original sin), and it treats every synonym as equal (they're not!).
Consider the thesaurus
Dean’s Thesaurus: 1,000 words to save us from extinction (logo: dinosaur)
Imagine a “situational thesaurus.” Instead of just unpacking related words, you unpack all the contexts that a word can apply. Examples:
addle — social media, work, disinformation (dilution from quantity)
faustian — VR / AGI or e/acc, finance, cloning, influencers, adderall, steroids
platonic — solids, relationships, education, leisure, cognition
This is the best vocabulary test I found (of the three I tried):
https://preply.com/en/learn/english/test-your-vocab
What to expect: first, they give you a grid of 50 words, ranging from really easy to really hard. I knew probably 90% of these. But then based on what you select, it gives you a second group of words that’s at the edge of your zone,
... See moreDictionary dump (unformatted): a/an : “A was modified from the Egyptian hieroglyph representing the eagle. In Hebrew it was an ox, and in Greek it was a “symbol of a bad AUGURY in the sacrifices.” The distinction between a/an happened around the 1300s. aardvark : South African “earth pig” aaron’s serpent : “something so powerful as to swallow up
... See more
They thought it would be particularly useful for writing in a certain voice or character, or for coming up with thematically exciting words. They wondered what kind of thesaurus would come from a corpus of nautical novels (like Moby Dick)