WordNet: a Dictionary app on steroids from Princeton

Please don't call it a dictionary. It's "an online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory." Actually it's pretty flippin' cool, that's what it is. WordNet goes beyond simple definitions and finds synonyms, hyponyms, hypernyms, and puts a word in context. It's based on synonym sets, or synsets, which map lexical concepts, and provide a more powerful way of exploring the relationship between words... In other words, it might help your writing instead of hurting it (like a thesaurus tends to do). Available in Win and Unix flavors, plus a Mac version here.

 

Tags: dictionary, freeware, lexical+reference, LexicalReference, opensource, princeton, thesaurus, wordnet