Graph Words: A Free Visual Thesaurus of the English Language
From the post:
One of the very first examples of visualization that succeeds in merging beauty with function is Visual Thesaurus, a subscription-based online thesaurus and dictionary that shows the relationships between words through a beautiful interactive map.
The idea behind Graph Words [graphwords.com] is quite similar, though the service can be used completely free of charge.
Based on the knowledge captured in WordNet, a large lexical database of the English language, Graph Words is an interactive English dictionary and thesaurus that helps one find the meanings of words by revealing their connections among associated words. Any resulting network graph can also be stored as images.
I particularly liked “…helps one find the meanings of words by revealing their connections among associated words.”
I would argue that words only have meaning in the context of associated words. The unfortunate invention of the modern dictionary falsely portrays words as being independent of their context.
The standard Arabic dictionary, Lisan al-‘Arab (roughly, “The Arab Tongue”), was reported by my Arabic professor to be very difficult to use because the entries consisted of poetry and prose selections that illustrated the use of words in context. You have to be conversant to use the dictionary but that would be one of the reasons for using it, to become conversant. 😉 Both Lisan al-‘Arab (about 20,000 pages) and Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon (about 8,000+ pages) are online now.