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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
    Commented Jul 22, 2010 at 12:08
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    I don't want to encourage those horrible websites.
    – delete
    Commented Jul 22, 2010 at 16:34
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    @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...
    – 40XUserNotFound
    Commented Jun 19, 2011 at 22:35

9 Answers 9

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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 http://img2.pict.com/cc/cf/f5/3826065/0/1279826241.jpg

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    ingenious idea.
    – delete
    Commented Jul 26, 2010 at 1:10
  • It's what I do. I am the mike.
    – mike the mike
    Commented Jul 26, 2010 at 14:52
  • The image needs updating
    – Eight Days of Malaise
    Commented Oct 12, 2010 at 3:17
  • Furthermore, if your problem is ads, use a browser extension to block them, such as Adblock.
    – Ellesa
    Commented Jun 14, 2011 at 4:35
  • your picture link is dead, could you please insert it via the image insert link?
    – Lance Roberts
    Commented Jun 16, 2011 at 5:20
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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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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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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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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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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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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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MSN Encarta isn't bad.

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Out team is working on Power Thesaurus (http://www.powerthesaurus.org) - it is an online thesaurus focused on good content and user-friendly experience (that includes low-ad count as well).

Hope this helps!

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    You only seem to post links to this website - if you are affiliated you should disclose this as per this site's "How not to be a spammer" guidelines or your posts may be removed as spam.
    – John C
    Commented Jan 29, 2015 at 12:27
  • Hi John, I have edited the answer to reflect the affiliation. Thank you for the tip.
    – Alex
    Commented Feb 13, 2015 at 10:46