Reverse Dictionary Site

[lvstephanie]

I think I had a "senior moment" yesterday when I was talking to a friend. I was telling a story and suddenly blanked out on the word that I wanted to use. I ended up just describing what I meant ("furniture used to store china dishes"), and my friend replied with the word I was looking for ("You mean a China hutch?").

It got me thinking that that might be a good site to have on-line. It doesn't happen, but every once in a while I'll know that I heard a word used that perfectly describe the concept I want to get across but can't remember what the word is. I was thinking that perhaps others experience this and would find a reverse dictionary helpful.

Today I Googled reverse dictionary and aside from the dictionaries that were trying to point me to the page where they define "reverse", I found a few, but was discouraged by how they worked... To test the ones I found, I entered in the phrase / definition that I used when talking with my friend, but none of them mentioned the word "hutch". The closest were "cupboard" and "buffet", but still wasn't quite what I wanted. I'm guessing that the ones I found used some type of search routine to search definitions that were a close match to the words used in the definition, esp. considering some of the words seemed way off unless I considered the words in my definition under a different context and / or didn't include all of my words: "refrigerator" is a piece of furniture that stores dishes of food, "dishwasher" is a piece of furniture that holds dishes while they're washed, "China shop" is a store that sells dishes.

That got me thinking that instead of trying to do something programmatically to create a reverse dictionary site, what if a site were set up like those task sites (like Amazon's Mechanical Turk site, or the tasks section on FC). Or perhaps like those help forums where the poster votes for who answered their question the best. And to get people willing to become a reverse dictionary for another person, give them some type of compensation for their work (eg. 5-cents if you get picked as answering the question the best, maybe a 1/10 of a cent if you replied but weren't picked as having the best, and charge the poster 10-cents to ask for a word.

What do you guys think? Would any of you use such a service either to find a word or to earn money for providing words? Do you think there'd be enough people willing to pay someone else to come up with a word for them? Or perhaps extending this concept to include a human thesaurus or a human rhyming dictionary?

[loulizlee]

You can check the Thesaurus which has different words that mean the same thing.  Also, check Merriam-Webster (also online) for words that mean the opposite (as well as definitions).