thesaurus

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus provides a definitive reference of words in the English language in an easy-to-use electronic format. With a simple layout and excellent results, this is the king of electronic dictionaries.

The program is delightfully simple to navigate, with an intuitive layout and highly readable results. We never considered looking for the Help file because everything is so crystal clear, which is a good thing in a reference work. You can scroll through an alphabetical list of the entire dictionary or simply type in a word to call up a definition. If you misspell a word, the … Read more

Once upon a time, desktops were the tops of actual desks, and nearly all of them had a paper dictionary on or near them. The best dictionaries were so huge they needed their own stands. You can still see them in libraries. But nearly everyone who has a computer uses a Web-based dictionary, such as the cleverly named Dictionary.com, or some kind of software-based reference. TheSage's English Dictionary and Thesaurus is the latter sort. It's a free utility that maintains a huge dictionary and thesaurus locally, not online, so it's completely portable, though it can access … Read more

Write Source provides users with a word processor for .txt documents that successfully imitates Word. In addition, the program offers an added feature that will help users search for words.

We felt instantly comfortable with this program's interface since it smoothly mimics Microsoft Word all the way down to its layout. The Help file's instructions were necessary to master some of the more complicated features, but basic writing was a snap. Our previous experience with word processors that save as .txt files had been disappointing since they always seemed to fall short of Word with their clumsy layouts … Read more

Liquid Story Binder XE is a comprehensive program that allows users to organize every aspect of the novel-writing process. The program's many features are almost its downfall, however, as the number of capabilities is somewhat overwhelming.

The program's interface manages to be both sleek and awkward. Each of its various tools opens in a new window, and the program allows users to save their preferred combination of windows as a workspace. We can see how this would be beneficial, but we prefer tabs over multiple windows. We were also bothered by the program's default color scheme, which … Read more

You use it online, and beginning on Wednesday, you'll be able to use the popular Dictionary.com reference service on your iPhones and iPod Touches.

The free Dictionary.com for iPhone is straightforward, but attractive, and has one or two highlights that give it some interest. It isn't the only dictionary application for iPhone by a long shot, but it is a solid effort that has brand name appeal for Internet vocabulary geeks--plus, it's got those helpful tidbits we mentioned. For instance, after typing a search term, you can switch between the dictionary definition and thesaurus without … Read more

Are you ever at a loss for words? Whether you're writing an essay, a letter, a business proposal, or even a novel, there are inevitably times when the right word is just out of your mind's reach. In the old days, you might pick up a dictionary or thesaurus to find a specific word, but now most people know that resources on the Internet are only a couple of clicks away. There's one program I like to use, however, that's even easier than opening your Web browser.

WordWeb is a free program that lets you highlight … Read more

This excellent freeware program will stop you from ever fretting over a definition or antonym again. WordWeb offers hot-key lookup and offline resources in a smart package.

In addition to displaying definitions, synonyms, and antonyms, WordWeb can find sets of related words. The database has more than 150,000 root words and 120,000 synonym sets, and plenty of proper nouns, pronunciations, and usage tags. It can't tell you when you've split your infinitives or garbled your gerunds, but it gives great word accuracy on the fly.

WordWeb is a handy utility that gives you the definition, synonyms, and antonyms of any given word without requiring you to go online, though it can connect to the Internet for expanded functionality. The interface should feel familiar, since it resembles many office application dictionaries. Users can manually type words into the Lookup text field, but the real strength of the program lies in the hot key function that lets users find definitions with a single keystroke.

The bottom pane offers tabs for such items as synonyms, antonyms, and related words. There are tools for changing the database to one … Read more

When Power Downloader recently sat down to check his e-mail, he quickly noticed a message from his niece, Kitty Kilobyte. In the message, Kitty explained that she would soon be attending a summer English class, which would mean she would probably be writing a lot of papers. She went on to explain that though she was embarrassed to admit it, spelling wasn't her greatest skill, and any software he could recommend would be a big help.… Read more