A thesaurus beside your writing

Synonyms by meaning, not one long list

Most words mean more than one thing, and a synonym fits only one of them. Bright can mean shining, clever or cheerful; brilliant works for the first two and not the third. So the thesaurus starts from the meanings. For each one you get:

• A short definition, so you can tell the senses apart.
• Words that mean the same in that sense. For an adjective this includes close relatives, so happy also offers glad, joyful, content and elated.
• Opposite: unhappy for happy, slow for fast.
• Broader and Narrower words: run is a way to travel rapidly, and jog, sprint and lope are ways to run. Narrower words are often the livelier choice.

Long lists show the first two dozen words with a more link, and words that have many meanings show the most used few, with the rest a click away.

It keeps the word's form

Select running and the thesaurus looks up run, then shows its words the way your sentence needs them: sprinting, jogging, hurrying. Select ran and you get sprinted and hurried; select mice and you get plurals. The words a form came from are named above their meanings (a form of run), and clicking that name looks it up.

Capitals follow the word you replace: Happy at the start of a sentence becomes Glad, and BIG in a heading becomes LARGE. Irregular verbs come out right where English has a fixed form (took, flew), and comparatives such as happier show the plain word's meanings, so check the ending yourself there.

Where the words come from

The thesaurus is built from WordNet 3.1, a lexical database of English that groups words into sets of synonyms, each with a definition, and links the sets by meaning: opposites, broader and narrower terms, similar adjectives. Text Studio's copy has about 104,000 meanings for 126,000 words and phrases, with names of people and places left out.

WordNet describes meanings rather than style, so it lists formal, slang and rare words side by side. Big offers large and huge, and also humongous and Brobdingnagian. Read a word in your sentence before you keep it, and use the arrow beside any word to see its own meanings first.

A word it does not have, such as a misspelling, gets suggestions one letter away: type beautifull and it offers beautiful and beautifully.

Finding the right word, faster

• Repeated words. Press Ctrl F, turn on Whole words and type the word you overuse: every one lights up. Double-click each and pick a different word from the panel.
• Walk the list. The arrow beside a word looks that word up, and the back arrow in the box returns to the previous one, so you can follow a chain of meanings to the exact shade you want.
• Check as you go. The Check button opens the grammar checker beside the same text, which catches a swapped word that no longer agrees with its sentence.