Visuwords™ online graphical dictionary

13 july 2008--Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.
Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections.
It's a dictionary! It's a thesaurus!
Great for writers, journalists, students, teachers, and artists.
The online dictionary is available wherever there’s an internet connection.
No membership required.
Visuwords™ uses Princeton University’s WordNet, an opensource database built by University students and language researchers. Combined with a visualization tool and user interface built from a combination of modern web technologies, Visuwords™ is available as a free resource to all patrons of the web.
The Visuwords™ Interface
To use the applet you only need to type a word into the search query at the top of the page and press 'Enter'. A network of nodes or 'synsets' will spring out from the word that you entered. A synset is essentially a single concept that is represented by a number of terms or synonyms. Synonyms are words with different spellings that convey the same idea. For example when you lookup "seem", you see that the word is connected to four synsets each represented by a green circle. Green denotes verbs so all of these synsets represent verbs. Two of these synsets have the lone word "seem"; one has two terms: "appear" and "seem"; and the third has three terms: "look", "appear" and "seem". Each of the four synsets has its own definition. Hovering over a node with the mouse will reveal all of the synonyms for a given synset as well as its definition. Some synsets will also show a few examples of usage. These synsets link to each other and to other synsets according to entries in the WordNet database.
You can zoom the model in and out by rolling the wheel on your mouse. You can click the gray background within the applet and drag the mouse in order to shift the whole model around so you can explore. You can grab any node and pull it away from the others to clarify connections.
Understanding the links between Synsets
"is a kind of" — hyponym/hypernym pair
With regards to "wheat" and "grain", we see a cyan link from "wheat" pointing towards "grain" we can understand this to mean that wheat "is a kind of" grain. Here, "wheat" is a hyponym and "grain" is a hypernym.
In the case of verbs this same cyan link can be understood better by "is one way to". So, for example, to trot "is one way to" walk.
"is an instance of" — hyponym/hypernym pair
In these relationships, the hyponym is specific and unique. For example, "Einstein" is an instance of a "physicist".
"is a member of", "is a part of", "is a substance of" — meronym/holonym pair
In these cases the meronym in some way belongs to the holonym. Examples: "robin" is a member of the "thrushes", a "wheel" is a part of a "wheeled vehicle", "caffeine" is a substance of "coffee".
SEE SITE BELOW:
http://www.visuwords.com/?word=porcupine