[visual thesaurus]
xxhttp://www.visualthesaurus.com
summary of the application
| the visual thesaurus by thinkmap brings a visual orientation to the role of the thesaurus. with a lexicon of 145,000 english words and 115,000 meanings, visual thesaurus is a heavy hitter in the thesauri biz. upon entering a search term, visual thesaurus builds a tree, or concept map, of related words color coded by noun, verb, adjective and adverb as applicable. words which are highly related are grouped together. the links between words provide definitions and examples. a dashed red line indicates that the connected work is a antonym. you can email a map to a colleague just with a few clicks. hosted instances of visual thesaurus are priced from $2.95/month or $19.95/year for individuals, $29.95 for groups, and steeper discounts for organizational subscriptions. They also offer a desktop version for $39.95. |
personal effectiveness xxx
visual thesaurus is simply amazing. it uses imaging to not only provide you with apropriate optional words, but it's gruff exterior belies a nuanced level of content that is competitive with any ink on paper thesaurus. the natural structure of a concept map allows visual thesaurus to utilize distance between terms to help further one's understanding of how the words are related. you can then launch a web search on a term by right clicking on the term.
you decide if you want it in 2d or 3d. you can also change the font and colors of the display. you can listen to the words being pronounced. the international beta of the hosted version comes currently covers dutch, french, german, italian, and spanish.
this tool will blow you away whether you're looking at it from a linguistic perspective or a web 2.0 perspective.
learning effectiveness xxx
for sometime now, a thesaurus has been a fundamental tool for most college students and business folks who write as a major component of their jobs. visual thesaurus definitely goes where the ink on paper versions can only imagine. graphically showing the relationships between words is both a powerful way to combine text and image for presentation but also a great memory aide for helping consolidate the knowledge for future use. the interface is elegant and doesn't interfere with the to understand the shades of meaning between words.
coolness xxx
visual thesaurus takes a dry and unexciting body of knowledge and morphs it into an exciting exploration tool. you can't get much cooler than that!
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do you know a competitor to this application?
if you know of a competitor to visual thesaurus and it's not in the list below, feel free to add it to the list by filling out the form to the right. that will put it on my radar screen for possible review. thanks!
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