3.28.2005

You Know What They Should Have...

How many times have you been typing a paper or sending an email or whatever and had to stop because the right word, the one you know expresses your idea perfectly, is stuck on the tip of your tongue? I'm not a psychologist but isn't it true that people think of words in terms of concepts. How often do you forget a word but know what you want as a cross of two or more other words? Wouldn't it be useful if someone created a thesaurus that gave answers based on cross-referencing multiple word inputs? Like if I'm looking for the word that's a cross between "confusing" and "secret" I'll quickly find "cryptic." The way it is now, you'd have to wade through up 10 definitions for each word, with huge lists of synonyms corresponding to each definition; in total you could easily have to look through hundreds of words before you found the one you were looking for. These days, given the widespread use of computers and the wonders of the internets, it should not be hard at all to write a program with this function.

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