WordNet
May 6, 2008
I haven’t been posting, because I’ve been writing all the time, and I probably will continue not to post for a few weeks, because I will continue to write all the time. But meanwhile, if you find yourself wondering about words at all, and wanting to navigate them in ways the dictionary can’t quite help you with, you might look at WordNet, which apparently has been around forever, but which I’ve just discovered. I think it’s not intended primarily for use as a dictionary- or thesaurus-like database, but you can use it that way, and it’s weirdly great.
For example, if you look up “compost,” you discover that compost is a type of composition (composition: “a mixture of ingredients”), and that the other types of composition are paste, soup, and beebread.
