Websites, which enhance our vocabulary, are always useful for our studies. Recently, I came across three sister websites that not only boost vocabulary but also give you alternate ways of expressing a particular thing as you enter a query in the search bar of websites www.relatedwords.org; describingwords.io and reversedictionary.org.
All these websites work as search engine. When you enter a particular word in the search bar, the websites will return with dozens of related words according to your search. Click any of the words in the results and you will get the definition of that word. The definitions are sourced from the famous and open-source WordNet database. Let us explore how these sites work for you.
First relatedwords.org, the site works closer to a thesaurus in the sense that it returns synonyms for a word (or short phrase) for your query, but it also returns many broadly related words that aren’t included in various online thesaurus or dictionaries (the site claims).
While describingwords.io helps you find adjectives and interesting descriptors for things like waves, sunsets, trees, beach, etc., the site gives you extra freedom to sort words by ‘uniqueness’ and ‘usage frequency’.
However, reversedictionary.org works a bit different. It simply looks through tonnes of dictionary definitions and grabs the ones that quite closely match to your query. For example, if you type something like ‘longing for a time in the past’, then the engine will return with words like ‘nostalgia’, ‘ homesick’ ‘missing’.
One of the pros of all three websites, which I found quite useful is that as you click a definition or a meaning of the word, the site won’t open a separate page which usually distracts you from the main page and going back to the main or homepage becomes a hassle. But here, you just have to click the word, and a pop-up box opens explaining the query with two more options ‘Related words’ and ‘Close’ so for those of you who aren’t satisfied with the explanation can click related words and dig deep into the meanings.
Overall, the sites give you ample knowledge about using a single word in different contexts and you can enhance your vocabulary accordingly.
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Published in Dawn, Young World, June 2nd, 2018
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