thesaurus

Dean’s Thesaurus: 1,000 words to save us from extinction (logo: dinosaur)

A thesaurus is a word treasury.

The thesaurus sucks. You can always tell when a writer is using a thesaurus and random words are substituted to sound smart. The problem is the thesaurus has a bad architecture. It's flat. Everything connects to everything (the original sin), and it treats every synonym as equal (they're not!). Since we don't have a hierarchy of "core words" and "s

A lexigraph of “uproar” (46 entries):

uproar (n.) : an event that disturbs a pre-existing order; ranging from trivial misunderstandings to devastating violence; accompanied by sound. 1520s, German/Dutch: “to stir up.” Middle English, roar: “…a loud, continued sound.” Typically negative, but sometimes turns to humor from de-escalations and clarifica

What are the irreducible semantic units behind any language? I want to figure that out, draw them in 50 or so diagrams, and put it on a poster.

The goal with the lexigraph is to create mini-dictionaries for each root word. The sum of root words are graspable by someone in elementary school. This would give them a map of all nuance behind the basic concepts they already know.

Maybe upper tiers of vocabulary are hard to pierce because we don’t have any frameworks to organize or remember. Con

For the semantheon, roots should be indivisible. A root obviously has multiple synonyms. Synonyms can have multiple roots (and it’s also need to think that the variation between synonyms comes from a relationship with another root.) But you can’t link roots to other roots. For example: “before” and “in front” can be synonyms (“I stood before it” /

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

A semantheon has groups of pairs; every pair has two opposite primes, each of which has a lexigraph, a tree of clustered synonyms. A semantheon is a hierarchical map of all meaning, and it can work in any language.

Here are the groups: space, time, quantity, quality, evaluations, emotions, interactions, change.

Here’s a story about the sequence of