Can anyone recommend a really brilliant on-line thesaurus?

I have one on my computer but it takes a while to find the exact shade of meaning.

I'm at this age where the most basic words sometime escape...

I use this one: http://thesaurus.reference.com/ which also has a dictionary, but still find it hard to find the right word.

Thanks Naomi. Just used it to look up a word, and in the 10 results, it didn't throw up anyof the words in my computer thesaurus.

Is that good or bad, Issy?

Not sure - am still looking - am hoping it will pop into my head. Thanks

I always just type the word I need a synonym for plus Thesaurus in to Google and it lists several thesaurus definitions in one go from various sources.

I use an actual book - the Bloomsbury one. Haven't yet found an online one to touch it, plus it has fantastically useful lists of things like every Greek God ever, and sailing terms, and so on - perfect for that touch of authenticity. Plus because it's Roget-style (but better than Roget), rather than dictionary-style, it's brilliant for browsing in and around what you're thinking about, and reminding you that no word is actually a synonym for any other.

Emma

Thanks,excellent suggestions, will give them a go.

I use an actual book

Emma, you freak.

Seriously, and I guess maybe also to get a discussion going, is a thesaurus really the way to go? Or, and not to commit authorial heresy, if the first word you think of doesn't fit, is another that means more or less the same not just burying your initial idea under a layer of pretension?
Surely the thing is to get your underlying thoughts right and then to write it as naturally as possible so that readers see your story and not your research skills?

If the first word you think of doesn't fit, is another that means more or less the same not just burying your initial idea under a layer of pretension?

I think you've answered your own question. If the first word fits, it's right for the initial idea. No need to go further. But if it doesn't, if your gut is uneasy about it, then obviously it's not exactly right, and maybe there's a better one which didn't occur to you - which the thesaurus might tell you. Sometimes there isn't: the word you want is halfway between two, and you just have to plump for one or the other (the interesting thing about being translated, apparently, is that sometimes the word DOES exist in that language).

No word means exactly the same as another: they all have different overtones, so they have a different effect. Different words for the same thing/action have different figurative implications, too, in which case you might be avoiding a cliché, or an implied mixed metaphor, or adding to a pattern of imagery. Or you might need a better word for prosodical reasons - rhythm, pace, alliteration (or avoiding it).

Emma

Perhaps, for highly stylistic descriptive work. Definitely for poetry and so on...

For dialogue? Never: you write as your character speaks.

For gritty realism? It sounds like an unforgivable crime to dress up an inarticulated earth inverter as a shovel or vice versa.

For me? I find the moment I start to worry about making a sentence too precise is also the moment I start to lecture rather than to illustrate and dramatise.

This is just an opinion, but for me the author's first responsibility is to communicate in a way that their readers can relate to and (for dramatic fiction) the sophistry of nuanced word play anywhere other than for a sophisticated character's speech is at best indulging the author's vanity.


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To be clear;
What I am trying to avoid is that awful moment where the reality you have strived so hard to create disappears as the author, and not the narrator, appears on the page.

If the first word fits, it's right for the initial idea.

Ok, that's my problem.

It's backwards.

If an idea is clear enough in your head, you can explain it to anybody using very simple words.

If not, then is it the idea or the words that need to change?

Purely by sitting down to write something big like a novel and getting far enough to join something like WW, I think it is clear that we all have a basic ability to put words down in a defensible order.

But that isn't what makes great literature.

There may be only whatever number of stories, but there is an infinite variation in nuance and ideas around and within those stories.

That's what makes great literature.

It's like the elevator pitch, until you can describe your story in one sentence that will captivate your potential audience, you don't know what your story is. And until you can pad it out to fill 100000 words that are interesting you don't have a novel.

I think that what I am trying to say is this:

When I find I cannot easily express an idea without resorting to a thesaurus, I believe that I need to examine the idea more closely and not worry about my limited vocabulary.

For me? I find the moment I start to worry about making a sentence too precise is also the moment I start to lecture rather than to illustrate and dramatise.

But precise to what?

To an idea, perhaps.

Or perhaps not: some ideas worth having are take a lot of quite technical words to express. I've been reading Ricouer, and it's incredibly complex thought, at least to someone like me who got their first degree pretending to be a tree. But I keep going because really, truly, he couldn't have said it any easier.

If an idea is clear enough in your head, you can explain it to anybody using very simple words.

But a great deal of what you're expressing in a novel isn't ideas. I was using your word, as shorthand for eveyrthing you're trying to express, but actually ideas are quite a narrow part of a novel as a whole. And even ideas are fundamentally pre-verbal. Words are only the language we choose to express them with, and some times words do that better than others. If my project was to express ideas as clearly as possible, I'd write non-fiction.

Precise to a sensation? To affect? It can be incredibly hard to evoke - perhaps that's a better word than express - a feeling, whether it's physical or emotional.

Precise to human consciousness? Arguably that's the central function of fiction, in the sense that it's more central to fiction than to any other art. And again, there's a great deal of consciousness which is non-verbal, inarticulable, even you might say pre- or sub- or un-conscious - in which case, trying to evoke/express it can be very difficult indeed. But it might be exactly what one's trying to do.

Emma

OK, let's assume that I can accept at least a large portion of that last post and I'm aware of a lot of unconscious nuance that I put in merely because I enjoy "getting into character" as I write. But I still shy away from doing too much of my reader's work because so much is non verbal. If you believe actions speak louder, then it should be enough to describe what is done in simplistic terms and let the reader imagine the bits that writing will never do justice to.
Maybe, I should simply ask:
[B]When is it right to use a thesaurus in preference to simply honing what you want to say?[/B]

When is it right to use a thesaurus in preference to simply honing what you want to say?

Sometimes you can use a thesaurus as part of honing what you want to say. On the one hand yes, the idea exists before it's put into words. But we all know the feeling that it's in the writing down - the finding words - that we actually find out what it is we're wanting to say. In which case it can be that it's in choosing between several words which dance around the idea you haven't yet quite articulated, which makes you know which one you want.

Another time, since in writing fiction we are by definition going beyond our personal experience, there's also the question of vocabulary. Opening it at random, my Bloomsbury thesaurus has 33 words listed under 'Trousers', from pants (US), trews (Scot), cords, flannels, pinstripes... to striders (or strides) (US inf), pistols (US inf), joggers (inf). It has 40 phrases under 'joint possession', and 60 under 'profit', from 'gain' to 'exes'. I don't think my vocabulary's poor, but I wouldn't trust it to produce every one of those 60 possibilities when that little twinge in me said that 'profit' wasn't right, and neither was 'perk', 'pin money' or 'lagniappe'...

And more broadly, as Bakhtin says

For the prose artist the world is full of other people’s words, among which he must orient himself...He must introduce them into the plane of his own discourse, but in such a way that this plane is not destroyed.

in which case I may have my own words already - the way I would say something, the way I would express an idea, feeling, thought, sense-data - but that's not enough for a novel. The thesaurus is full of those other people's words, and I need the maximum choice of them, if I'm to find the one which is 'other', while not destroying 'mine'.

Emma

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Specifically for my own purpose, as a writer who works with history, the 'other people's' words include ones which are no longer in common use, or in use at all. The perfect word, which is simultaneously other enough to be defamiliarising, while not being so other that it'll trip up or even baffle readers...

paduasoy, anyone? (Though that's also Beatrix Potter's...)