# synonymous phrase dictionary



## JarekSteliga

This thread is not entirely appropriate for this particular forum, but having failed in an English only forum, I am desperate enough to give it a shot here. 
*
Are members of this forum aware of any such dictionaries freely available in Internet or commercially distributed?

*Ordinary dictionaries or thesauruses do not list for example "on edge" or "on tenterhooks" under "nervous", nor do they group together expressions like: "not at all", "never mind", "you are welcome", "any time", "my pleasure" which have the same or near the same contextual value. Therefore a learner who decided to go it alone has no access to unknown phrases when they are needed.


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## majlo

Try diki.pl.


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## dreamlike

You can't possibly expect any dictionary to list all the expressions and idioms there are. Besides, you were probably not fortunate enough to come across this thesaurus, which lists both "on edge" and "on tenterhooks". It proves very useful when it comes to expressions like "not at all", "you are welcome", too.  Give it a go


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## JarekSteliga

majlo said:


> Try diki.pl.



Thanks, I added "diki" to my collection of online dictionaries, however it is not what I am after.


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## JarekSteliga

dreamlike said:


> You can't possibly expect any dictionary to list all the expressions and idioms there are. Besides, you were probably not fortunate enough to come across this thesaurus, which lists both "on edge" and "on tenterhooks". It proves very useful when it comes to expressions like "not at all", "you are welcome", too. Give it a go



I do not expect any dictionary to list all the expressions and idioms there are. I have been fortunate enough to come across the thesaurus you mentioned, but indeed overlooked the depth of its contents. Still even this dictionary is not what I am on about. I did give it a go. Here's an example. I wrote "out of this world" in the search box and the expression *was found* and it was defined as "extraordinary". I then wrote "extraordinary" in the search box and unfortunately "out of this world" was not listed among the many synonyms displayed. Am I really asking the impossible? To use my original example, I expect to find "not at all", "never mind" and "you are welcome" once for example "my pleasure" is written in the search box. In other words I would like to lay my hands on a list of expressions which have similar contextual value to the expression or just a word which I already have learned.  I want to find "put up with" under the keyword "tolerate" etc. I am quite certain this sort of dictionary would help language learners to make their written texts far more interesting. 
Therefore my original inquiry about the existence of any such dictionary stands. I encourage members of this forum to inverstigate and share the results of their investigation for the - in my view - unquestionable benefit to us all.


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## LilianaB

I don't think you will ever find this kind of a dictionary, because back translation does not always make sense. It all depends on the context. If someone was to list all such possibilities the dictionary would have to have 5 million entries, and I am not even sure if it would make much sense. You could try any reverse dictionary. This might help you to a certain extent.


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## JarekSteliga

LilianaB said:


> I don't think you will ever find this kind of a dictionary, because back translation does not always make sense. It all depends on the context. If someone was to list all such possibilities the dictionary would have to have 5 million entries, and I am not even sure if it would make much sense. You could try any reverse dictionary. This might help you to a certain extent.



You are not the first person who points out to the fact of "my dictionary" being either useless (someone actually said that this kind of dictionary sure would exist if there were a market for it) or impossible to put together. However I am still unconvinced. 

I fully agree that at the present day level of artificial intelligence, "back translation" or "reverse dictionary" is unlikely to yield good results. But please observe that what I am talking about is neither of the things you mentioned. I believe the dictionary I have in mind operates purely on the basis of synonymy. Seeing how the word thesauruses serve the purpose of providing us with huge numbers of synonymous words, I do not understand why the same concept of synonymy could not be extended to include expressions, collocations, phrasal verbs you name it. 

The dictionary http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/indignant suggested by DREAMLIKE is pretty close, but when I put it to the test, for some reason it failed to produce the expected results. Here is an example. When I wrote "up in arms" in the search box, a list of synonyms was returned including the word "indignant". I then used "indignant" as a key word, but "up in arms" (which is what I hoped to find in the first place) did not appear on the list of synonymous words/expressions. Another example: "inattentive" is one of the synonyms under the key word "absent minded", but "absent minded" is not listed under "inattentive". I don't get it why these synonymy links are not symmetric, but whatever the reason, it does not seem insurmountable.


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## kknd

JarekSteliga said:


> You are not the first person who points out to the fact of "my dictionary" being either useless (someone actually said that this kind of dictionary sure would exist if there were a market for it) or impossible to put together. However I am still unconvinced.
> 
> I fully agree that at the present day level of artificial intelligence, "back translation" or "reverse dictionary" is unlikely to yield good results. But please observe that what I am talking about is neither of the things you mentioned. I believe the dictionary I have in mind operates purely on the basis of synonymy. Seeing how the word thesauruses serve the purpose of providing us with huge numbers of synonymous words, I do not understand why the same concept of synonymy could not be extended to include expressions, collocations, phrasal verbs you name it.
> 
> The dictionary http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/indignant suggested by DREAMLIKE is pretty close, but when I put it to the test, for some reason it failed to produce the expected results. Here is an example. When I wrote "up in arms" in the search box, a list of synonyms was returned including the word "indignant". I then used "indignant" as a key word, but "up in arms" (which is what I hoped to find in the first place) did not appear on the list of synonymous words/expressions. Another example: "inattentive" is one of the synonyms under the key word "absent minded", but "absent minded" is not listed under "inattentive". I don't get it why these synonymy links are not symmetric, but whatever the reason, it does not seem insurmountable.



thesaurus.com matched "inattentive" and "absentminded"—i don't know how about rest but it seems to be working…


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## LilianaB

Hi, Jarek. Unfortunately artificial intelligence will never be able to translate properly, unless people start speaking like machines. First someone will land on Mars than this will happen. Back translation usually does not work, since everything depends on context: this is why you could not find this word again if back translated in a prestigious dictionary. The dictionary you have in mind could be even confusing to some people, especially learners, because they would take it for granted that the phrases are synonymous without context. There are very few words which are truly synonymous.


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## JarekSteliga

kknd said:


> thesaurus.com matched "inattentive" and "absentminded"—i don't know how about rest but it seems to be working…



I looked again and saw "absent-minded" is not listed as a synonym to "inattentive". However it is listed as a so called "related word", so an attentive reader as opposed to an absent-minded one should be able to spot it 

And on the whole, the more I put it to the test, the more my respect for the "thesaurus.com" grows.


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## JarekSteliga

LilianaB said:


> Hi, Jarek. Unfortunately artificial intelligence will never be able to translate properly, unless people start speaking like machines. First someone will land on Mars than this will happen. Back translation usually does not work, since everything depends on context: this is why you could not find this word again if back translated in a prestigious dictionary. The dictionary you have in mind could be even confusing to some people, especially learners, because they would take it for granted that the phrases are synonymous without context. There are very few words which are truly synonymous.



I am sure you have a point there. But I am not giving in. I have always felt while browsing dictionaries, irrespective whether English-English or English-Polish, that essential, most authentic bits of language are falling through the cracks. I will illustrate for you what I mean. For example I come across this expression: his trousers barely came down to his ankles. My reflection is, how on earth am I to remember this sort of expressions. It is obviously impossible to memorize them all. Before the advent of computers I resigned myself to the fact of never being able to lay my hands on lots of colourful, everyday life word collocations . But nowadays, the elusiveness of expressions I am making reference to is *tantalizing. *The enormous knowledge seems to be at our fingertips and yet inaccessible by a hair's breadth. The PWN-Oxford computer based dictionary which I am using will sadly not provide me with "come down to ..." when I want to translate the Polish "sięgać do ..." unless I happen to actually remember the key word "come" and spend some considerable time sifting through all the prhasal verbs listed under "come". It frustrates me to see a wealth of information already packed in and yet out of my reach when technology is clearly there.


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## miguell

www.ling.pl


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## JarekSteliga

miguell said:


> www.ling.pl



Not what I am after (in the sense of this thread) but on the face of it a very good dictionary in its own right.  I am adding it to my collection of online dictionaries. Thank you.


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## Oletta

Jarek,

I suggest that you should buy the Dictionary of English Word Combinations, such as the BBI (my favourite dictionary of English collocations but you can certainly find some other dictionaries of the sort). Here is one of them online: http://5yiso.appspot.com/ . 

In certain cases you need to look for the root of a word, though, instead of NERVOUS, for instance, try NERVE. Such dictionaries do not solve your problem completely but at least they are richer than the regular ones.  

Have fun with the English collocations!

Alex


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## JarekSteliga

Oletta said:


> Jarek,
> 
> I suggest that you should buy the Dictionary of English Word Combinations, such as the BBI (my favourite dictionary of English collocations but you can certainly find some other dictionaries of the sort). Here is one of them online: http://5yiso.appspot.com/ .
> 
> In certain cases you need to look for the root of a word, though, instead of NERVOUS, for instance, try NERVE. Such dictionaries do not solve your problem completely but at least they are richer than the regular ones.
> 
> Have fun with the English collocations!
> 
> Alex



Very interesting! Thank you.


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## Oletta

JarekSteliga said:


> Very interesting! Thank you.


 My pleasure. I have found something you might find interesting, namely a visual thesaurus: http://www.visualthesaurus.com/land...aign=VT&utm_source=gadget&launch=true&lang=en or http://wordsift.com/ .


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## Ben Jamin

The problems you describe will persist as long as there are no dictionaries based on concepts, not words. I admit, this would be a formidable task to compile such a dictionary, especially that there exist many times more concepts than words, and different languages have often concepts that don’t exist in other languages, or are slightly different (when can two concepts in different languages be considered equivalentl?).  But I believe that this task will once be endeavoured in future, as this is the best way to effective machine translation.


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## dreamlike

Would you care to elaborate, Ben Jamin? I'm not quite sure what do you mean by "dictionaries based on concepts" - especially that concepts, are, in fact, conveyed by words - of course, there's always room for improvement, but what you are suggesting really could prove difficult to implement, if I understood correctly.


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## Ben Jamin

dreamlike said:


> Would you care to elaborate, Ben Jamin? I'm not quite sure what do you mean by "dictionaries based on concepts" - especially that concepts, are, in fact, conveyed by words - of course, there's always room for improvement, but what you are suggesting really could prove difficult to implement, if I understood correctly.



Just find the word “man” in any monolingual or bilingual dictionary and see how many concepts are there listed for the entry. Merriam Webster gives 21 concepts. And now imagine how a complicated net of references you have to establish to translate all those concepts (not the word) into another language. If concepts were used as the base units of a database then the concepts could be defined and given a identifying code.
Today’s dictionaries are based on words as basic units in the databases.


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## LilianaB

I think, I agree with you, Ben Jamin, I am just not sure if this is not totally Utopian. I don't agree with the machine translation part. Also, I think these dictionaries would have to be more of anthropology books. How do you explain or categorize concepts. You have to explain the culture's worldview to explain concepts.


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## Lorenc

Ben Jamin said:


> The problems you describe will persist as long as there are no dictionaries based on concepts, not words.



Maybe Roget's thesaurus is something similar to what you have in mind...?


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## Oletta

Roget's thesaurus has also many limitations, I used to use it some time ago. If you refer to some updated edition I am not an expert, though.


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## Ben Jamin

Lorenc said:


> Maybe Roget's thesaurus is something similar to what you have in mind...?



Yes, the Roget's Thesaurus is based on a similar principle, but my idea differs at many issues:
1. Roget is based only on English, while I think about a multiple language database
2. Roget contains only a limited number of concepts, while I think about a fairly comprehensive base, containing structural words, ordinary names of objects, and concepts which have own names only in a few languages (but necessarily in English).
3. Roget has no precise definitions of concepts, my base would contain definitions.
4. Roget's main concern is giving English synonyms, while I think about linking best corresponding words in other languages to the concepts.


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