Praise for the Visual Thesaurus

We were thrilled when G4-Tech TV's "Call for Help" decided to review the Visual Thesaurus. Click here to watch the whole review.

"On the whole, the VT3 is magnificent. Unlike my Roget's, the VT3 contains some 39,000 proper nouns, American and British spellings and for online subscribers, beta versions in five European languages. The depth of the database is striking."

"4.5 Stars. Visual Thesaurus 3 is a remarkably inventive and interactive way to explore language."

"The Visual Thesaurus is a highly stimulating illustrative language tool. The use of colour coding for parts of speech and their relationships is a compelling and direct way of introducing children to complex associations within language."

"The Visual Thesaurus creates a floating constellation of related words. The new version will be attractive in that it adds keyboard shortcuts, spell checking, Internet searches, better print options and sound files with correct pronunciations to the mix."

"It's like the class know-it-all, but more fun."

"Visual Thesaurus goes even further [than most reference software], creating a unique, captivating visual representation of the English language that could never be bound in a book... The program installs effortlessly, and is easily customized."

"Once again, my favorite of the show was not the latest hardware gadget or some technology wonder; it was in fact a small little English utility that just astounded me. The Visual Thesaurus...is just what I need to get students excited about learning vocabulary."

"Visual Thesaurus offers an engaging way to explore the English language. You enter a word and then choose a path. Type in booty, for example, and follow the loot path (as opposed to the prize and plunder paths), then you can choose to go with lucre, and so on."

"VT is outstanding for exploring relationships between words, and ideal for brainstorming ideas in work and education."

"We applaud the innovation behind the Visual Thesaurus: It uses technology to animate and expand on the deeply rooted conventioin of traditional thesauri, and in doing so, provides an insightful, if somewhat arduous, journey through the English language."

"The whole interface feels almost alive; it reinforces word connections in a direct manner and encourages exploration... overall it's a rare, rewarding example of a paper-bound process that has been radically rethought from the bits up."

"One of the best tools we've seen... [the] Visual Thesaurus takes the traditional thesaurus and turns it on its head... Happily, it's a product we can't recommend enough to wordsmiths."

"Based on the now-familiar Java Web-programming language, these amazing thesaurus searches quickly become intuitive, and a user is continually surprised at the insights and solid results that each search delivers."

"A classic in this category is the Visual Thesaurus... Related words are linked with "virtual springs" that pull them together into a cluster. To navigate through the Visual Thesaurus, a user types in a word which pulls up a tree-like shape with the word in question at the centre, and related terms clustered around it... Definitions appear when the cursor is moved over dots next to the words. To find out more about a synonym, a user can click on it, which makes it move to the centre of a new cluster of words."

"Check out [the] Visual Thesaurus, for example. Type a word into the text box and you'll retrieve an almost intoxicating display with the word and all its various meanings and related terms. Speaking of intoxicating, try the word loaded. You'll see little branches spring forth for the concepts of affluence, laden, drunkenness, charged with ammunition, and so on."

"Is there a word on the tip of your tongue? Can you describe it, hear it, almost see it, but just can't say it? Then check out [the] Visual Thesaurus - an online fusion of language, design, art and typography. By displaying relationships between words and meanings as spatial maps, this funky tool translates language into something you see, as well as say. Just drop your word into its screen and it will splash up an array of multi-coloured alternatives, all rotating in 3-D around your own word. Click on whichever suits, and get a further splash of information and colour."

"A+"

"A shining example of injecting a staid reference work with a serving of cyberstyle, [the] Visual Thesaurus presents dynamically (via Java) a given word's relationship to other words."

"A near-perfect combination of content and design."

"If you're the type of person who's addicted to the Oxford English Dictionary and William Safire's "On Language" column, then you're going to love the Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus."

"Reference books have come a long way from the days when they were unwieldy volumes with thin pages dog-eared from use. The best recent advance in reference technology is the Visual Thesaurus, which uses Web animation to illustrate the latticework of language. Enter a word, and the thesaurus will generate a solar system of similar words orbiting around the sun of the original term; click on one of those words, and the system will reorganize."

"The Visual Thesaurus represents the marriage of Princeton University's WordNet (an online database that organizes some 50,000 words and 40,000 phrases into synonym sets) and ThinkMap's software (which its creators describe as "not primarily a data-visualization tool, but rather a data-animation tool"). The result is enchanting, if hard to describe: any word typed into the Visual Thesaurus appears onscreen like a spider bobbing at the center of a web of gently swaying gray filaments, each of which has at its end a synonym. Click on any one word at the periphery and it moves to the center of the screen, where a new web of associations emerges. (The old web, connected by the common synonym, is moved off to the side, where it is still easily accessible.) Because the display is run by a Java applet, viewers can customize the display of data: they can favor certain parts of speech, determine the extent to which synonyms of synonyms are displayed in the background, toggle between two- and three-dimensional representations of word associations, and more. The result -- as Marc Tinkler, one of the developers of the Visual Thesaurus, recently told The New York Times's CyberTimes -- is akin to "information choreography."

"Inventive. Imaginative. Ingenious. Fanciful."

"Duck - here comes an adjective. As you click deeper in, a similar word edges in from the right. Clearly this is not your average thesaurus. Strange stuff, perhaps, to the textual domain, but it's the linguistic way of life inside a new Java-powered word "nebula," as Thinkmap describes its Visual Thesaurus, which puts a premium on action, dynamic typography, and design."