One of the tools I take advantage of is a thesaurus. Since using a paper thesaurus is so ’80s, it’s almost a necessity to have one in the electronic form. My favorite to use is a combination of the tried and true WordNet and the GUI front-end Artha. With this combination you have a thesaurus at the ready with a simple hot key combination. Let’s take a look at installing and using this handy tool.

The tools

You may have heard of WordNet before. It’s a very handy command-line interface for the WordNet lexical database. By itself, WordNet is not terribly helpful (unless you are using it for writing scripts or applications). When combined with a front-end however, WordNet is very powerful. There are many front ends for WordNet, but one of the easiest to use is Artha. Artha is a free, cross-platform thesaurus that depends upon WordNet for the backend.

Installation

The installation of these two tools is simple. You can either search for them and install them from within your Add/Remove Software tool (search for “wordnet” and “artha” – no quotes), or you can install them via the command line. Let’s install from the command line. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Open up a terminal window.
2. Issue the command sudo apt-get install wordnet artha.
3. Type your sudo password when prompted.
4. Accept all dependencies (if necessary).

That’s it. Once installed you will find Artha in Applications > Accessories.

Usage

There are two ways you can use Artha:

• From the Artha window.
• As a hot key tool.

Figure 1

The most obvious way to use Artha is from the Artha window (see figure 1). From within that window you can enter a word in the Query section and hit the Search button. This will bring up all of the information about the word you chose. As you can see, I searched for the word Linux.

Figure 2

The second, and more efficient, way to use Artha is as a hot key tool. When you close Artha (by default) it will minimize to the notification area so it’s still running in the background. To look up a word all you have to do is highlight a word (in any application) and click the hot key combination Ctrl-Alt-w. When you do this a notification window will appear with the information about the word (see Figure 2).  If you hit the hot key combination a second time, the Artha window will appear with the information about your selected word.

Final thoughts

Writers tools are a must have for anyone looking to make their work more efficient and accurate. If you’re looking for a solid thesaurus tool, look no further than WordNet and Artha.

The online service will compute a list of words that have been found in the text and categorize them in multiple ways. The words are for example sorted by relevancy and subject. A click on any word will also display the relationship to other words in the text, a definition of the word and example usage from the text.

A word cloud is displayed that is showing all words that have been discovered in the text. It is possible to filter words by relevancy or subject which can reduce the amount of words quite a bit. The subject filter is interesting as it displays word that fall into subjects such as math, science or art.

VocabGrabber has been designed to create a vocabulary list which can be a great help to understand and learn the text that has been pasted into the web form. It is currently only working with text that has been written in English.

It delivers what the firefox dictionary can’t. You may lookup words by simply pressing a hotkey, the word will be looked up and explained in great detail in the sage. If the word does not exist in the dictionary it presents a list of words that look similar or use the wildcard button to find the word you are looking for.

The great thing about the sage is not that it is easy to use. It’s purpose is not to deliver fast results, the process to lookup a word is simply to slow to be effective (mark a word, hit the hotkey, look it up in the sage, manually edit the word). The sage is effective when it comes to understanding words that you do not know. It also helps by being able to work with almost any other program on your computer.

As you all know the firefox dictionary is restricted to firefox and thunderbird, what if you want to write something in an instant messenger ?  The Sage has a history function, can stay on top if you like. It displays synonyms and hypernyms while looking up the word and is able to create anagrams from the word as well.

Oh, the hotkey is CTRL+SHIFT+A, took a while to look it up in the documentation.