What is the name for those friendly volunteer museum guides? Or that little plastic tube that is fixed on each end of a shoelace?
What is the word for a female donkey? I know a male donkey is a jack. Is a female a jackette?
My niece is afraid of men with beards. I know there's a word for fear of beards but I can't think of it right now.
Well, a Reverse Dictionary like the one at OneLook can give you all these answers.
OneLook's reverse dictionary lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word. In most cases you'll get back a list of related terms with the best matches shown first.
OneLook indexes hundreds of online dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference sites. They do this using an assortment of statistical language processing hacks.
Yikes, though. Sometimes many of your search results are complete nonsense. For some types of searches, only the first result or the first few results are likely to be useful. OneLook urges you to click on a word to check its definition before using it in your Booker Prize acceptance speech or honors thesis.
If you get back nothing but junk, try restating your query so that it's just two or three simple words. Some queries are very difficult for the system. That's because not every dictionary indexed by OneLook is used by the reverse dictionary, and their search algorithm still needs some work.
Nevertheless, it is a very handy website. Now what is the word that means next to last?
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