How do I use OneLook's thesaurus / reverse dictionary? OneLook lets you find any kind of word for any kind of writing. Like a traditional thesaurus, you can use it to find synonyms and antonyms, but it's far more flexible. Describe what you're looking for with a single word, a few words, or even a whole sentence. Type in your description and hit Enter (or select a word that shows up in the autocomplete preview) to see the related words. You can order, filter, and explore the words that come back in a variety of creative ways. Here's a video which goes over some of the basics. What are some examples? Task   Example searches  
🔆 Find a word by describing it   barrel maker
before the flood
museum guide
search for food
urge to travel
what a milliner makes
tried twice for the same crime
when cancer spreads through the body
 
🔆 Explore synonyms and related concepts   fancy
baseball
clouds
twisty
push
industrial revolution  
🔆 Get a list of words in some category ("type of...") type of bird of prey
type of soft cheese
type of light bulb  
🔆 Find more words similar to some examples (comma-separated list) squishy,spongy,gooey
bicycle,motorcycle,scooter
ice cream,pie,cookies  
🔆 Answer basic identification questions capital of Vietnam
longest river in the world
original host of Jeopardy  
🔆 Solve crossword puzzle clues, or find words if you only know some of the letters.
(Use :description syntax) ??lon:synthetic fabric
s?nt?:christmas
l*ch*:fruit
??????:hit
c*:board game


Exploring the results Click on any result to see definitions and usage examples tailored to your search, as well as links to follow-up searches and additional usage information when available. OneLook knows about more than 2 million different words and expressions covering every topic under the sun. Try exploring a favorite topic for a while and you'll be surprised how much new stuff there is to learn! Ordering the results Your results will initially appear with the most closely related word shown first, the second-most closely shown second, and so on. You can re-order the results in a variety of different ways, including alphabetically, by length, by popularity, by modernness, by formality, and by other aspects of style. Click the box that says "Closest meaning first..." to see them all. (Here's a short video about sorting and filtering with OneLook Thesaurus.) Filtering the results You can refine your search by clicking on the "Advanced filters" button on the results page. This lets you narrow down your results to match a certain starting letter, number of letters, number of syllables, related concept, meter, vowel sound, or number of syllables. Read if you're interested in how they work. I'm only looking for synonyms! What's with all of these weird results? For some kinds of searches only the first result or the first few results are truly synonyms or good substitutions for your search word. We highlight these results in yellow. Beyond that, the results are meant to inspire you to consider similar words and adjacent concepts. Not all of the results will make sense at first, but they're all connected with your search in some way. We'd rather give you too many options than too few. If you're unsure of a word, we urge you to click on it to check its definitions and usage examples before using it in your Oscars acceptance speech or honors thesis.

What are letter patterns? If you know some letters in the word you're looking for, you can enter a pattern instead of, or in addition to, a description. Here are how patterns work:

Other ways to access this service: Is this available in any language other than English? The same interface is now available in Spanish at OneLook Tesauro as a beta version. More languages are coming! How does it work? We use a souped-up version of our own Datamuse API, which in turn uses several lingustic resources described in the "Data sources" section on that page. The definitions come from Wiktionary, Wikipedia, and WordNet. Here are some with the current system.
Much gratitude to Gultchin et al for the algorithm behind the "Most funny-sounding" sort order. Profanity and problematic word associations If you're using this site with children, be forewarned you'll find profanity and other vulgar expressions if you use OneLook frequently. (We take an unflinching look at how words have actually been used; scrubbing out hurtful wordswould be a disservice to everyone.)

Some of the thesaurus results come from a statistical analysis of the words in a large collection of books written in the past two centuries. A handful of times we've found that this analysis can lead us to suggest word associations that reflect racist or harmful stereotypes present in this source material. If you see one of these, please know that we do not endorse what the word association implies. In egregious cases we will remove it from the site if you report it to us via the feedback link below. Privacy No personally identifying information is ever collected on this site or by any add-ons or apps associated with OneLook. OneLook Thesaurus sends your search query securely to the Datamuse API, which keeps a log file of the queries made to the service in the last 24 hours. The log file is deleted after 24 hours and we do not retain any long-term information about your IP address or invididual queries. Who's behind this site and where can I send my comments and complaints feedback? OneLook is a service of Datamuse. You can send us feedback here.

The sunburst logo (🔆) is the emoji symbol for "high brightness", which we aspire to create with OneLook. (The graphic came from the open-source Twemoji project.)