Culture: Website: Reference
Intersection Thesaurus   (+7)  [vote for, against]
Look up two words, find the words that relate to both of them.

Doug is writing up an incident report to discuss what happened in his laboratory last night. All he told me was that it involved ethanol and a large electromagnet.

Doug needs a word similar to both "mangle" and "break". More explicitly, he needs a verb that both describes the action of changing unsatisfactorily, and making some object no longer function.

He attempted using the reverse lookup dictionary, but he had a hard time constructing a definition to suit his needs. He would much rather enter two words into a web form, and have the computer do the work for him.

Such a service could be implemented by creating a map of relationships between lexemes. The search process would involve building a list of synonyms for the two queried words, and returning the intersection of lexemes that correlate with both words.
-- ed, Nov 29 2007

Reverse-lookup Online Dictionary Reverse-lookup_20Online_20Dictionary
Doug tried to use this resource to solve his problem. [ed, Nov 29 2007]

Visual Thesaurus http://www.visualthesaurus.com/
I like this UI [hippo, Nov 29 2007]

Princeton WordNet http://wordnet.princeton.edu/
Perhaps this data set could be adapted [wiml, Nov 29 2007]

An excellent idea and very easy to implement.[+] For example, the results given from a search at thesaurus.com could be searched for a second term with very little additional code. You can kinda do it using CTRL+f.

The search could be made better by also looking at second level relationships if there are no results for the 2 terms you entered, ie, a word from each result have the same synonym.
-- marklar, Nov 29 2007


My only concern is that the whole scenario behind this idea is a sham. It's really going to be used for inventive pun creation, isn't it?!

(Wow, [hippo]. That's a very smart bit of content presentation. I'm impressed.)
-- Jinbish, Nov 29 2007


Yes, very nice, it allowed Tom to find the word "mutilate", which appears to fit Doug's requirements.
-- zen_tom, Nov 29 2007


I would have settled for 'breangle', myself. There's nothing wrong with a good portmanteau, or goodmanteau.
-- Jinbish, Nov 29 2007


Cool, now I just need to find a dictionary and look up lexemes. But even as a pun creation tool it is cool.
-- MisterQED, Nov 29 2007


This is the 'six degrees of separation' graph traversal problem, although for sensible answers it has to be a three-step chain from Word A <-> target <-> Word B.

What's potentially more fun is any odd-numbered chain of the form Word A <-> Word A+1 <-> ... target ... Word B-1 Word B.

I might just code this up this evening for the fun of it - I have all the necessary tools.

G
-- gtoal, Nov 29 2007



random, halfbakery