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I'm frequently looking for a different way to phrase a word. For example, today I wanted to find a word similar to "plague" but without the negative connotations. If I type "thesaurus" into Google, I get

Maybe I am asking too much, but does anyone know of a thesaurus site with low ads, fast response, and high quality? I was hoping that Project Gutenberg's Roget's thesaurus might provide a solution but the number of words is rather low.

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why not having the direct links to the websites? – Lipis Jul 22 '10 at 12:08
2  
I don't want to encourage those horrible websites. – delete Jul 22 '10 at 16:34
1  
@delete links to external sites have the rel="nofollow" attribute applied to them, so they get no Google page rank from here when you link to them. If you link to them, it makes everyone else's lives a little easier, since we don't have to copy and paste to visit those websites... – ColdHawaiian Jun 19 '11 at 22:35

8 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

Use the Google to hack Thesaurus.com!

http://www.google.com/search?q=candid+synonyms

Replace "candid" with whatever word you are searching for. Click "+" mark to see results.

alt text

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1  
ingenious idea. – delete Jul 26 '10 at 1:10
It's what I do. I am the mike. – mike the mike Jul 26 '10 at 14:52
The image needs updating – Eight Days of Malaise Oct 12 '10 at 3:17
Furthermore, if your problem is ads, use a browser extension to block them, such as Adblock. – Kaze Jun 14 '11 at 4:35
your picture link is dead, could you please insert it via the image insert link? – Lance Roberts Jun 16 '11 at 5:20
up vote 4 down vote

I don't have any other sites to suggest, but I do want to add the point that sites can be modified on your end through browser extensions. The most obvious is using some sort of ad blocker. I personally use thesaurus.com and have few gripes with its inteface once the ads are out of the way.

You can also build in search shortcuts to most browsers to quickly pull up results from your site of choice. For example I use Chrome for everyday browsing and have a shortcut setup such that typing "tr word" instantly looks up 'word' on a Turkish dictionary site.

Lastly you can tweak the input and output routines of sites using things like greasemonkey, http://userscripts.org etc. You could add keyboard shortcuts for navigating the site, remove interface elements you find cluttering, etc.

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up vote 2 down vote

If you are unhappy with any of the free services, you could register for a premium thesaurus.com account and...

enjoy faster browsing with no ads!

https://secure.reference.com/cgi-bin/premium/register.pl

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up vote 0 down vote

If you want the best quality then yes you are asking a bit too much.

I would recommend Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus. It gives in context examples with the thesaurus. I have not used it online because there is no need for me (as I already have it built in with Mac OSX spotlight and soon to put it on my iPhone). The subscription for three months is about 20 USD with VAT.

My second recommendation would be the .NET application http://www.spell-check-thesaurus.com/ . As said on the page it is still in beta. It does give a simple listing of all the words grouped by specific meaning and type.

e.g.

(noun) infestation

  • infestation
  • swarm
  • cloud

(noun) calamity

  • calamity
  • catastrophe
  • disaster
  • tragedy
  • cataclysm

This was based on OpenOffice set and I am assuming Sinonimi as well.

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up vote 0 down vote

I use yourdictionary.com and I've always been happy with it.

From time to time I fall back to wordreference.com it often provides translations that are not on other websites.

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up vote 0 down vote

I find thefreedictionary.com to be fantastic, as a dictionary and thesaurus. Simply scroll down to the thesaurus section after a word's definition.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/plague#thesaurus

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up vote 0 down vote

It's one of the best, you cant miss it!

Just try it and let me know what you think:

http://www.wordwebonline.com/

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up vote 0 down vote

MSN Encarta isn't bad.

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