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Show HN: Carefulwords.com, a more inspiring thesaurus (carefulwords.com)

258 points by simonsarris ↗ HN
I began this in late September purely on the whims of frustration with thesaurus.com, which does not bother to focus the input box! So I made my own site that focuses the input box. And because I wanted a thesaurus where I could type just the term in the address bar (eg type carefulwords.com/word) to get my results.

It is very rough around the edges right now. There are far too many synonyms, which themselves are only organized alphabetically. I hope to take the site in a more inspiring direction over time than merely synonyms. Perhaps euphemisms, or other poetic uses from the past, or author commentary, or something altogether different.

55 comments

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antognini
This is very cool! I'm reminded a little bit of definr.com, which was a basic super-fast online dictionary but sadly disappeared a few years ago.

Where did you get the thesaurus that you based this off of?

tfsh
This is really nice! I generally use powerthesarus.org when I'm in need of synonyms, however the slimmed-down design of this and quotes are a charming touch. The dataset also seems to be better, for want of a better word (ironically!), the output seems more sophisticated. How much if this is hand curated?
simonsarris
I'm using the Moby Thesaurus, a public-domain thesaurus of about 30,000 terms, slightly edited by me so far. I am not crazy about this source, but it was an easier way to start.

My intent is to hand-curate the most common 2,000 or more words, over time. But since I am just one person and have many projects (and two babies), I can only devote about one hour each night or less to this, once everyone else is in bed, so it will take me a little while.

yreg
Power Thesaurus gives much better results imho. Careful Words includes a lot of results that are not synonyms at all, and just relate to the query in some way. So depends on what the user is after I guess.

I'm also not a fan of the results being sorted alphabetically, it would be more useful to have them ranked. The design and simplicity is nice though.

yawnxyz
this is really nice!! I'll be using this instead of Powerthesaurus, for sure.

Could you turn the suggested words into hyperlinks, please?

simonsarris
Yes, I will add them. I hesitated with hyperlinks because I kind of like double clicking to select the text, to copy it, when you find a word you like.
yreg
You could add a copy button – or "use this result as a query" button – next to each result. The copy button might be better, since otherwise you need to tripple click + cmd c to copy a multi-word result.
e12e
Maybe add link after the word? Eg: word (^)
noodlesUK
This is gorgeous. I was just discussing the need for a better thesaurus with my partner!

I love the quotes.

One suggestion — could you make the result words clickable? So as to let me go way down the rabbit hole?

simonsarris
I will. I said to another person, I hesitated because I personally like to double click the word text to copy it, and that gets in the way, but enough people have asked for it.
deopot
Maybe you could put an icon next to the word that copies it to the clipboard when clicked. Some websites use an image of a piece of paper with a top corner folded over to indicate this is the copy button.
VTimofeenko
May I suggest the inverse - an icon with a link? That way the original "double-click and copy word" use case gets preserved
noodlesUK
I like this. That would let you copy/paste more intuitively.
knight17
Why not keep both (copy, link) on a hover so that:

- it is easy to copy

- and navigate to that word's page

- and at the same time it will preserve the ability to click to select, too.

divbzero
I would second vtimofeenko’s suggestion to use an icon with a link to preserve double-click-to-copy.
blast
I understand the wish but I think that would spoil the elegant design.
gnfargbl
For a site like this, which has a very clear single function and which people are likely to visit again and again, it might be justifiable to have a small control somewhere on the page which switches all of the results between click-to-link and click-to-copy.

Each person is likely to have a fixed individual preference, so if you store that preference in a functional cookie then everybody gets their own way. Or, as your site would have it, their druthers.

teknopaul
Double click to copy/highlighting word. Single click to follow link?
bhrgunatha
I just added a keyword search in firefox* for inspiration when I'm searching for a replacement word.

* Assign a keyword (e.g. care) to a regular bookmark but place %s in the url (https://carefulwords.com/%s). It gets substituted for whatever is typed after the keyword.

So my keyword is care and I can type "care joy" into the url bar which opens https://carefulwords.com/joy.

mcculley
This is great!

I have been working on something related, a tool to watch over my own writing and suggest better words: https://github.com/mcculley/WordWhittler

Would you consider making an API or an export of your thesaurus?

throwthere 

  curl https://carefulwords.com/word | sed -rn 's/<li>([^<]*)<.*/\1/p'
mcculley
This yields just a list of terms, not the relationships between them.
2devnull
This is excellent. It would be even more fun if clicking on one of the synonyms opened a page for that synonym. I really like the quotes and the esteem for the classical, and myth.
rnkn
Agree. The synonyms really look like buttons that may be clicked/tapped.
richardatlarge
Yes, box should link to that entry.

What is really needed in this and the app on my phone is a decision tree before the results to narrow down in terms of adjective, verb, adverb, etc. This shortens to the words you’re really wanting.

For example, entry: boot

Verb? Noun?

vector_spaces
This is silly but typing "poop" in the search bar and hitting enter gives a "Page not found" -- maybe the search auto complete drop-down can let you know that a word isn't in the thesaurus and not try to redirect on enter.
simonsarris
Oh that's a good idea. Since I'm already loading all possible words in the JS, I don't even need to point to a 404 or "term not found" page, it can be right there that I display something.

I'll add that soon.

coinspin
> Since I'm already loading all possible words in the JS,

How many words is that?

EZ-Cheeze
Instant favorite thing after 5 seconds
wahnfrieden
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simonsarris
Since very early printing times many publishers adopted colophons: logos or emblems that can be quite elaborate but are nonetheless easy to add to a page or binding if you have a printing press and can make a die.

For example some old ones that Oxford University Press used in the 1500s and 1600s: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61421/61421-h/images/illus6a...

I wanted a logo that felt like a colophon to complete the printerly effect that I wanted for the site design.

I have a hobby of viewing artwork from online sources that archive the kind of stuff that almost never make it into museums: sketches, prints, photographs, etc. Not because this art is low quality, but because there is so much of it that it couldn't possibly be displayed. Actually, I curate a list of high quality digitized sources for such: https://simonsarris.com/art-collections

I save a lot of it. So looking through some saved pieces, I came across the sketch of the nude reading, and cleaned it up a bit. It's by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, late 1800s (public domain of course). Not remotely one of his famous works, which are pretty much all paintings.

I was going to redo the sketch in SVG, so that dark mode readers would be able to invert it better, but getting sketch lines to look good in SVG actually takes considerable effort, so its just a jpeg for now.

50
I love this! A Barthesian project.

Should we be careful of what words do compared to what they mean, or rather, is it best to be impulsive at the risk of catastrophe?

Ologn
Tangentially - I developed a Thesaurus site a bit back. One minorly innovative thing is I used hunspell for verb tense, singular/plural etc. (so you have https://www.matchingwords.com/en/flowed as opposed to https://carefulwords.com/flowed or https://www.matchingwords.com/en/trees as opposed to https://carefulwords.com/trees ). So I tried to do a Google Adwords campaign for the website and they said I need an about, contact and disclaimer section - so I put that. Then they said I was not "unique enough" to be able to pay them to run ads for my site. So I showed them how I could handle more cases than many thesaurus's could due to hunspell, but - no deal.

I usually do Android apps, but so much of the work was getting hunspell and the MyThes thesaurus working I decided to put up a website with that. But there was so much hassle, like Adwords not wanting to take my money, my first website money-making venture of that era was a bust. I did OK on Android apps though.

motohagiography
This is beautiful and even revolutionary. The references from poetry and other great works that provide context for why those words mean what they do to us are a stroke of genius.
rex_lupi
I love it, especially the poetry quotations! I have wanted something like this for a long time. Thank you.
IAmPym
Some odd associations here... whimsy gives back, among other things: maggot

I have never seen a whimsical maggot, nor do I think I want to

fat_cantor
The first word I tried was 'object' and the first synonym was 'IC Analysis'. I don't even know what that means.
jansan
Not sure if this makes sense or if it is possible, but getting something like a word cloud as a result would be awesome. The more obvious synonyms will be bigger, the more distant ones will be smaller. Even if it does not work 100% I think this would be nice.
nathias
These aren't really synonyms right? What are they? How are you getting the data? (I'm basing this on solitutde - alienation example).
ivanche
I must be missing something here. https://carefulwords.com/fast gives back 349 results, starting with "Barmecidal feast, Encratism, Friday, Lenten diet, Lenten entertainment, Lenten fare, Pythagoreanism, Pythagorism, Rechabitism, Sabbath, Shakerism, Spartan fare, Stoicism, Sunday" and also containing "ecclesiastical calendar, extravagant, firm as Gibraltar, hell for leather, hell-bent, promiscuous" and many many others which, I believe, are nowhere near being synonimous with "fast".
derbOac
"Promiscuous" is in fact a now dated implied synonym for "fast": "fast" in the sense of "quick or very open to engaging in sexual activity".

You're right about many of the rest not being synonyms per se, although they are related words (related to "religious fasting" for example).

Timwi
How many other thesaurus websites have you examined? It sounds like you assumed thesaurus.com was the only one in existence. (Personally I use freethesaurus.com, and if I need more synonyms, Merriam-Webster.com.)
jasonshen
Love this! The addition of phrases (I searched "invent" and got "break ground" "bring forth" and "hit upon") is what my other favorite word explorer (onelook.com) is missing. Great for coming up with terms for headlines, marketing copy, and titles. Congrats on the launch and keep going.