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thesaurus posts

Filed under: Fun, Blogging, Productivity

Thsrs: it's a thesaurus, but shorter

Do you type a lot of SMS or Twitter messages? Watching your character count closely? Maybe you should check out the Thsrs, a new thesaurus from Ironic Sans. Put in the grandiloquent word you were planning to use, and it will give you a shorter synonym to help you save characters while still making sense.

What inspired Thsrs? Well, David at Ironic Sans thought people needed a little help composing understandable messages "w/o needing 2 use ugly abbrev's." Seems like a fine idea to us! There might still be a few kinks to work out -- one commenter noted that 'awesome' humorously returned 'awful' as a synonym -- but Thsrs worked pretty well when we tested it. Try it yourself, and let your messages be understood!

Filed under: Office

Dictionary and thesaurus on a thumb drive

Merriam-Webster USB Dictionary & ThesaurusIn my opinion, selling software on a USB drive is a fantastic idea, and Merriam-Webster has taken it and run with it with their USB Dictionary & Thesaurus. It's a 256MB flash drive that includes MW's dictionary and thesaurus software, plus phonetic spelling correction, a grammar guide, and a "Confusables" function for correcting mistakes like their vs. there vs. they're. It also includes something described as an "eBooks and eNews Manager." The rest of the space on the USB drive (the amount of which is unspecified) can be used to store whatever you want. Unfortunately few details on the software itself are available, so I'm not sure if the dictionary and thesaurus software are the same as the ones MW sells on CD-ROM, or whether it works on a Mac. The Merriam-Webster USB Dictionary & Thesaurus costs $49.95. Now, when can I get the OED in my pocket?

[Via Engadget]

Filed under: Text, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Freeware, Open Source

WordNet: a Dictionary app on steroids from Princeton

wordnetPlease don't call it a dictionary. It's "an online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory." Actually it's pretty flippin' cool, that's what it is. WordNet goes beyond simple definitions and finds synonyms, hyponyms, hypernyms, and puts a word in context. It's based on synonym sets, or synsets, which map lexical concepts, and provide a more powerful way of exploring the relationship between words... In other words, it might help your writing instead of hurting it (like a thesaurus tends to do). Available in Win and Unix flavors, plus a Mac version here.

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Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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