Thesaurus.com sucks
I’m just stunned at how bad of a thesaurus Thesaurus.com is. Actually, most of the online thesaurii are pretty awful, however Thesaurus.com is awful in its own way.
Thesaurus.com has a lot of content, but it’s not comprehensive. You look up a word and you get hundreds of results (many of which have absolutely nothing to do with the word you are searching for), but at the same time, whole classes of meanings are just — missing.
For example - yesterday I wanted to find a synonym for the word ’sharing’, in the sense of a common interest or attribute, such as “sharing a love of great films”, or joint ownership of a bank acount. Well, Thesaurus.com has no such notion - instead, it only lists “sharing” as a syonym of “dividing” or “apportioning” and a few other similar synonym, all of which seem centered around the concept of partitioning of a ‘rival good’, which is not what I am looking for. And this is not the first time I’ve had this experience.
Anyone know of a really good thesaurus out there? I’ve tried a bunch.
October 15th, 2006 at 9:06 pm
A hard copy of Roget’s?
I believe they also publish an electronic version as well.
October 17th, 2006 at 8:39 pm
Wordnet?
October 18th, 2006 at 2:01 am
WordNet is often good, but it also has a ton of missing pieces
May 3rd, 2008 at 9:58 pm
I agree that thesaurus.com sucks. Especially now that they’ve limited their content and are making users upgrade to “premium” content that we had been getting for free. The perpetrators of this bastardization and greed should suffer horribly. Greedy, greedy pricks…
May 23rd, 2008 at 2:36 am
Yes, it’s 18 months after this post appeared and as Marik notes, thesaurus.com is comprehensively bastardized. For the last month or so it is effectively and utterly useless. Common words result in just a few synoyms, less common (most of my searches) result in NOTHING.
Bye bye thesaurus.com. Enjoy your new life as useless commercial rubbish.
May 23rd, 2008 at 10:09 pm
I think this is a popular landing page for those wanting an alternative.
This is THE alternative, but just a little hard on the eyes. Sill quicker than using hard copy :0)
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/ARTFL/forms_unrest/ROGET.html