🥪 Words and Vocabulary - Tools and Websites 🥪

Power Thesaurus

This is probably my most visited website while writing. It’s a website built specifically for writers and students. It’s community driven, using a rating system to give a list of synonyms and associated words to the user’s search. If you’ve got a word that isn’t quite right, but you absolutely know there’s a better one out there, chances are, this’ll help you find it.

OneLook Reverse Dictionary and Thesaurus

Similar in a lot of ways to Power Thesaurus, this website is good for finding that word just on the tip of your tongue. Users can even find words by describing them in the search bar, for example, typing “urge to travel” returns the word “wanderlust”.

Reverse Dictionary

I haven’t personally used this website, but I’m sure someone reading this will find it useful. Here’s an excerpt from the site: “The way Reverse Dictionary works is pretty simple. It simply looks through tonnes of dictionary definitions and grabs the ones that most closely match your search query. For example, if you type something like "longing for a time in the past", then the engine will return "nostalgia"

Describing Words

Another tool I haven’t used myself, but I imagine others will find helpful. Essentially you enter a word into the search bar, and the site will return a bunch of possible descriptors for that word.

Google Ngram Viewer

Wondering if a word was in use during the time period of the book you’re writing? You can use this website to check a word’s popularity by year.

Online Etymology Dictionary

This is another tool for determining the earliest usages of a word. Excerpt from the website itself: “The dates beside a word indicate the earliest year for which there is a surviving written record of that word (in English, unless otherwise indicated). This should be taken as approximate, especially before about 1700, since a word may have been used in conversation for hundreds of years before it turns up in a manuscript that has had the good fortune to survive the centuries.”

List of colours by shade - Wikipedia page

What it says on the tin; it’s a big list of colours. I use it to nail down the right word when I’m trying to be specific with a colour description.

Lose the Very

Find a word to replace “very ____” in your manuscript using this tool.

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I have also compiled the above resources into a single Google document, if you would prefer to browse through the lists that way. The link can be found here: Sandwich's Writing Resources Compilation Link