June 20, 2009
OneLook Reverse Look-Up Dictionary
This neat online tool allows you to look up words when you know the meaning of the word but can’t think of the actual word itself. Here are some examples of searches that you can do with OneLook:
| bluebird | Find definitions of bluebird |
| blue* | Find words and phrases that start with blue |
| *bird | Find words and phrases that end with bird |
| bl????rd | Find words that start with bl, end with rd, and have 4 letters in between |
| bl*:snow | Find words that start with bl and have a meaning related to snow |
| *:snow or :snow | Find any words related to snow |
| *:winter sport | Find words related to the concept winter sport |
| **winter** | Find phrases that contain the word winter |
| expand:nasa | Find phrases that spell out n.a.s.a. |
You can also use OneLook’s Reverse dictionary feature. Here is an explanation of that feature from their website.
OneLook’s reverse dictionary lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word. Just type it into the box above and hit the “Find words” button. Keep it short to get the best results. In most cases you’ll get back a list of related terms with the best matches shown first.
OneLook indexes hundreds of online dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference sites. By now you may have used the standard search available from the home page, which shows you a list of definition links for any word you type in. This is the reverse: Here we search our references for words that have definitions conceptually similar to the words you search for. We do this using a motley assortment of statistical language processing hacks.
This is a great resource for C-Print captionists to have in their bag of tricks!
