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Thesaurus

© Janice Karin

If you do a lot of writing, you know that there are times when you can't quite put your finger on the perfect word to make one last point or figure out how to avoid using a common word in every sentence of a paragraph. At times like these, a thesaurus comes in very handy. Now you can keep one on your Palm so it is available whenever you need it.

Thesaurus by DDH Software is a thesaurus and spell checker for the Palm. It comes with a very large database of words listed by part of speech. If a word can be more than one part of speech, it is listed separately under each one. The entire database is just under 300KB (the application itself is only 22KB).

Buttons at the bottom of the screen let you toggle between thesaurus and spell check mode. In thesaurus mode you enter the desired word at the top of the screen and choose the parts of speech to look for from the buttons down the right side. You can look for nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, or all parts of speech. Once you have selected the appropriate options, tap on the Find Word button. The results will appear in the box below the Find Word button. Each word is followed by its part of speech in parentheses. Words with more than one part of speech will be listed once for each part of speech.

Clicking on a word in the results box makes it the active word. It will replace your original word on the lookup line and automatically find its synonyms. You can also scroll through the list of all words using the arrow buttons surrounding the Find Word button or re-find sysonyms of the last 15 words you used.

The spell check mode is simpler. The interface looks the same, but when you tap on the Find Word button it either says "Word spelled correctly" just above the word list box or it returns alternate suggested words in the box itself.

Since the dictionary is so large, it will find matches for most correctly spelled words. However, the algorithm used to determine the suggested alternate words when no match occurs needs a lot of work. It seems to work a lot better if the spelling error is near the end of the word. For example, when I used the British spelling "theatre" it did not match the word, and it returned 39 alternate suggestions. The first four were all theat* words related to the theater. However, when I used "meen" it returns 39 sugestions (nice coincidence!). More than half of the words begin with "mee" and "mean" is never returned (although "meanwhile" is).

The copyright of the article Thesaurus in Palm Computing Devices is owned by Janice Karin. Permission to republish Thesaurus in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.