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OneLook – Dictionary Search with Wildcards
- Mindless2112 6y agoI use the OneLook reverse dictionary all the time to try to find the right word (not for crosswords), but I do wish it were smarter. If only someone would make a deep-learning-based reverse dictionary.
- dougb5 6y agoMe too! I've carved out some time this summer to look into some approaches to the problem based on the BERT architecture. A few years ago I tried some (pre-BERT) deep-learning based approaches, but nothing panned out. The "dumb" information-retrieval based approach that my service currently uses is certainly bad, but stubbornly not as bad as all the alternatives I've tried in the 15 years since creating it!
- aminozuur 6y agoIf there's any other word-geeks out there, check out http://wordo.co http://wordo.co and follow me there: https://wordo.co/@aminozuur https://wordo.co/@aminozuur i'll follow back so we can both learn interesting words
- senkora 6y agoThis, along with https://nutrimatic.org https://nutrimatic.org, gets used a lot during puzzlehunts. Very neat tool.
- myself248 6y agoAnd Nutrimatic's own instructions link to http://www.oneacross.com/ http://www.oneacross.com/ which is crossword-specific. I've been using OneLook when I get really stuck on a crossword, but of course there are more options!
- dougb5 6y agoI'm the developer of OneLook and happy to answer any questions about it! It's been running continuously since 1996 and I've been (very slowly) adding features to it over the past couple of decades.
- fortenforge 6y agoDo you see spikes in usage during large puzzlehunt events?
- dougb5 6y agoI haven't noticed that, although I do get feedback from the puzzle hunt community from time to time!
- justaguyhere 6y agowhere do you get the word lists from? edit : never mind, found the list https://www.onelook.com/?d=all_&v=s&sort=&langdf=all https://www.onelook.com/?d=all_&v=s&sort=&langdf=all
- dougb5 6y agoOneLook crawls and indexes the headwords from ~1000 online dictionaries and glossaries. When you do a wildcard search, it searches all of these lists at once. Clicking on one of the results will show you the sources. The sites range from small subject-specific glossaries with a few dozen words, to commercial dictionaries like Merriam-Webster and OED.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoI used to use OneLook! It must have been about 17 years ago. Congratulations on such a long-running website.
- seaish 6y agoMy favorite version of this has been https://www.quinapalus.com/cgi-bin/qat?dict=6 https://www.quinapalus.com/cgi-bin/qat?dict=6
- shiftF5 6y agoOneLook also offers a nice API: http://www.datamuse.com/api/ http://www.datamuse.com/api/ which I've used for a web-based Pictionary game
- chime 6y agoI wrote a similar app long ago and people still seem to be using it: http://chir.ag/projects/tip-of-my-tongue/ http://chir.ag/projects/tip-of-my-tongue/
- k_sze 6y agoI could really use something like that, with the additional ability to add custom sources. My use cases: I read e-books in Calibre[1]. When I read novels in The Witcher series or in the Forgotten Realms meta-series, I need to lookup words that may or may not be just a creature in the universe of the novel. Having a page that automatically looks up a word in both real dictionaries and in The Witcher or Forgotten Realms wiki would be really cool. My daughter also reads e-books in Calibre, but her English is nowhere near my level. It's a second language for her. So she needs to be able to look up words in English-Chinese dictionaries. [1]: https://calibre-ebook.com/ https://calibre-ebook.com/