Exploding word associations

April 25, 2007 8:45 PM

Visuwords - an online graphical dictionary that uses Princeton's WordNet. Input a word and watch the branching associations.
posted by Burhanistan (18 comments total)

i just entered "george w bush" and it's a total blank
posted by pyramid termite at 9:24 PM on April 25, 2007

Oddly, no entry for eponysterical.

this is good, though.
posted by davejay at 9:24 PM on April 25, 2007

After a bit more interaction, as much as I liked this, I wish it went into the etymology of the words instead of just the definitions.
posted by davejay at 9:27 PM on April 25, 2007

After two attempts I got bored and started to look up rude words, like bottom, which was associated with fanny.

What a wonderful age of understanding we live in huh.
posted by Samuel Farrow at 10:04 PM on April 25, 2007

I wish it went into the etymology Amen to that. I think the funky flash interface could have been replaced with a list.
posted by mattoxic at 10:16 PM on April 25, 2007

I looked up the word 'set' which reportedly has the most number of meanings in the English language, and the result was pleasantly complicated.
posted by dhruva at 10:18 PM on April 25, 2007

It appears to be an updated version of the now classic "Visual Thesaurus" and based on the same dataset.
posted by bhouston at 10:22 PM on April 25, 2007

How's this for an opinion: It's pretty, but it sucks.
posted by chuckdarwin at 3:54 AM on April 26, 2007

Pretty interesting interface - probably an especially helpful tool for non-native English speakers. I emailed a link to my German-speaking girlfriend, who's studying translation, Italian and English.
posted by syzygy at 4:19 AM on April 26, 2007

Works best with verbs.
posted by humblepigeon at 4:48 AM on April 26, 2007

Love it, thanks Burhanistan. Enjoyable data visualisation is life changing in many ways, some subtle, some simple. I like seeing a word connections grouped in a cloud. Yes, etymologies would be a nice improvement. At the bottom of the page it says "developed by Paul R. Dunn".

However, according to his, maneri3102, delicious entry: "Visuwords Dictionary and Thesaurus - Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. This is my latest project still in development. More to follow shortly."
posted by nickyskye at 5:35 AM on April 26, 2007

I think I did it wrong.
posted by Uther Bentrazor at 5:50 AM on April 26, 2007

A funny thing happened when I clicked the link; the word that came up on display was orthogonality.
posted by Mister_A at 6:33 AM on April 26, 2007

I played with it for a little while, but within minutes I was ignoring the words themselves and instead played newton's cradle by jiggling the balls around and watching them interact with each other in elastic fashion. Maybe I'm a little too immature for the internets?
posted by talitha_kumi at 6:48 AM on April 26, 2007

No one is too immature for the intertoobz, poopy-head!
posted by Mister_A at 6:54 AM on April 26, 2007

This is cool as shit. Etymology would be nice, sure, but this is pretty amazing just the same. Thanks!
posted by Pecinpah at 7:51 AM on April 26, 2007

I fall into the "cool as shit" crowd, meself. I don't care about the absence of etymology - this is my new favorite website.
I agree, it is probably most useful to non-native speakers learning the language.
posted by msali at 8:18 AM on April 26, 2007

I think this is pretty cool. I may show this to my 4th and 5th grade remedial reading students this afternoon, plugging in their vocabulary words for the week and discussing the connections. I have several English language learners who would probably enjoy this.
posted by Emredi at 8:55 AM on April 26, 2007