Project:Thesaurus

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This is the main project page of The Languages of David J. Peterson Thesaurus, a The Languages of David J. Peterson subproject and a wiki namespace aiming at creating a thesaurus, a dictionary of synonyms, antonyms, and further semantically related terms such as hyponyms, hypernyms, meronyms, and holonyms. The project was formerly called Wikisaurus.


Please contribute your own Thesaurus entries, or add to the existing Thesaurus entries.

Purpose

The purpose of The Languages of David J. Peterson Thesaurus is to serve the role of an electronic thesaurus—a dictionary of synonyms, near-synonyms and antonyms, and near-antonyms, but also of other semantically related terms such as hyponyms, hypernyms, meronyms, and holonyms.

The purpose of such a thesaurus in general is mainly to help anyone who writes for living or fun—writers, managers, contributors to wikis, bloggers, and writers of love letters—to find words they don't recall or even know when they recall words that are semantically related to the sought word. In general, anyone to whom the choice of words matters can benefit from a thesaurus, especially one linked to a dictionary providing the definitions.

Added value of The Languages of David J. Peterson Thesaurus is its The Languages of David J. Peterson integration—it links to and is linked from The Languages of David J. Peterson.

Browse

To start browsing the thesaurus, you can start at the root, Thesaurus:entity, and proceed from there through the hyponymic network to high genera such as Thesaurus:person, Thesaurus:organism, Thesaurus:animal, Thesaurus:plant, and Thesaurus:artifact and further down. You can also browse by topical thesaurus category such as Category:Thesaurus:Geography (Thesaurus:forest), Category:Thesaurus:Personality (Thesaurus:humble) or Category:Thesaurus:Appearance (Thesaurus:beautiful).

Model

The thesaurus is organized primarily on the model of WordNet. That is, the key organizing principles are the relations of hyponymy (subclass) and hypernymy (superclass), and to a lesser extent meronymy (part of a whole) and holonymy (whole of the part). See also Project:Semantic relations. The design of Roget's 1911 thesaurus is somewhat similar in that it does not restrict the entries to lists of synonyms and antonyms; however, Roget's thesaurus does not use WordNet relations. The design of Oxford English Dictionary thesaurus is somewhat similar in that it has a hierarchically organized thesaurus. However, its subordination relation is not a strict hyponymy but is in part thematic. By contrast, the thesaurus of Merriam-Webster has synonyms, antonyms and words "related". Editors who want to create thesaurus entries that are primarily for lists of synonyms can do so without worrying about the other relations, but keep in mind that there should be only a single thesaurus entry for a synonym set, thereby avoiding duplication.

One sense per entry

Each entry should ideally have a single sense. Nonetheless, the format supports multiple senses for the cases where this seems to be the best option. It is usually possible to pick different headwords for different senses. Each entry should ideally stand for a semantic object; the headword should be in part an accident. The point is not to list all senses of the headword. Thus, there can be a single sense in Thesaurus:sound, and another sense of "sound" is covered at Thesaurus:inlet. If it becomes impossible to keep finding dedicated headwords, we may resort to disambiguating naming like "rich (wealthy)" or "rich, wealthy". Sometimes, the headword becomes less ambiguous by using a phrase: there is Thesaurus:English language. WordNet seems to do fine mostly by the comma convention.

To use the entry headword as a basis for covering all the senses of the headword would lead to a duplication of synonym rings covered in other headwords, at odds with the duplication-avoidance rationale for the thesaurus. Thus, there is no point in duplicating Thesaurus:spicy in Thesaurus:hot. By contrast, having a sense for an adjective and a sense for a noun in Thesaurus:German is a different use case and makes a little bit more sense, being caused by a lack of suitable English disambiguating headword unless one opts for "German person" and "German language" as headwords.

Multilingualism

English The Languages of David J. Peterson Thesaurus shall contain entries for other languages than English.

Category:Thesaurus entries by language features these entries. Categorization is ensured by passing the language code to the header template: {{ws header|lang=es}}.

Example entries for different headword/title conventions:

Topical categorization is an unsolved problem: there is Category:Thesaurus:Geography, but no language-specific one. We could create "Category:Thesaurus:en:Geography", "Category:Thesaurus:es:Geography", etc., on the model of mainspace topical categories.

Discussions:

Formatting

Formatting is specified and discussed at:

Example entries:

Inclusion

As for entry headwords, they must be attested. Not all mainspace entries should have their own thesaurus entry: the point of thesaurus is in part to prevent duplication of lists. The headwords can sometimes be sum of parts if deemed preferable, as in Thesaurus:beautiful person.

As for list items, all items in lists of synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, etc. on Thesaurus pages are required to be attested, using the same attestation criteria as the mainspace. There is no requirement that they must be more than sum of parts. Roget's Thesaurus did include many sum-of-parts phrases.

Semantic relations

See also Project:Semantic relations.

If you want to create synonym-only entries, you do not need to worry about the other relationships all that much. This is especially true of adjectives. For nouns, it often pays off to figure out a good node in the hyponymic (subclass/superclass) network.

Synonyms and antonyms

Synonyms are terms with the same or very similar meaning. Register (informal, vulgar, etc.) does not impact synonymy. Examples: Thesaurus:wise, Thesaurus:drunk. Some putative synonyms are better classified as hyponyms.

Antonyms are terms with opposite meaning. Antonyms are sometimes concentrated in an opposite thesaurus entry. Example: Thesaurus:drunk.

Hypernyms and hyponyms

Hypernyms are terms with broader meaning, capturing a superclass relationship: X is a hypernym of Y if each Y is also an instance of X. Example: Thesaurus:bird.

Hyponyms are terms with narrower meaning, capturing a subclass relationship: X is a hyponym of Y is each X is an instance of Y. Examples: Thesaurus:drunk, Thesaurus:bird. In many entries, hyponyms can be listed only up to a point, to some nesting level. For instance, it makes no sense to list all hyponyms in Thesaurus:person; by contrast, listing all hyponyms in Thesaurus:relative or Thesaurus:musician seems fine.

Holonyms and meronyms

Holonyms are terms for wholes containing parts: X is a holonym of Y if Y is part of X. Example: Thesaurus:relative.

Meronyms are terms for parts of wholes: X is a meronym of Y if X is part of Y. Example: Thesaurus:aircraft.

Classes and instances

X is a class of Y if Y is an instance of X, different from hypernyms. Example: Thesaurus:Ecuador.

Instances are opposite of classes, different from hyponyms. Example: Thesaurus:country.

Coordinate terms and troponyms

Coordinate terms, also known as cohyponyms, are mostly unused in the thesaurus since it duplicates hyponymic structures from other entries.

Troponyms are unused: use hyponyms and hypernyms for verbs as well.

Various

The section "Various" is intended to capture other interesting relations, to broaden the navigation network beyond specifically defined relations. It supports creativity, but may lead to disagreements between editors since there is no set of specific rules governing the section.

Example entries:

  • Thesaurus:number: has all sorts of terms relating to numbers that are not hyponyms or instances.
  • Thesaurus:size: has adjectives for size and these do not fit hyponymy or instance-of relationships.
  • Thesaurus:aircraft: has people on board, who are strictly speaking not meronyms.

Minimum item count

A putative thesaurus entry with 2-5 items can probably be comfortably handled by the mainspace synonym lists, and may be not worth an entry. However, there is no agreed on rigid rule for this. The thesaurus most pays off when the item counts are larger.

There is usually no need to create "leaf node" entries for 1 or 2 synonyms and 1 hypernym. Such items are sufficiently covered in the hypernym entries and in the mainspace. Thus, there is Thesaurus:lake but no Thesaurus:pond.

Templates

Lists of templates:

Templates:

Template Example Note
  • {{ws|beer|An alcoholic fermented malt drink.}}
  • {{ws|beer|*}}
  • {{ws|beer}}
 The second entry is a lazy one. The third one shows no tooltip, but also does not make it clear that one is missing.

Template:Ws beginlist Template:Ws Template:Ws Template:Ws Template:Ws Template:Ws endlist

To be put around a list of {{ws}} entries. Currently formats the list as a 3-column one.

Template:Ws header

Entered at the very top of the entry. When without parameter, determines the headword automatically.
{{R:Roget 1911|beauty}} Template:R:Roget 1911
{{ws sense|glad; in a good mood}} Template:Ws sense Used after the third level heading for the part of speech.

Mainspace

Linking from mainspace to Thesaurus entries:

  • Links to thesaurus entries can be added to the "Synonyms" section (or "Hyponyms", "Antonyms", etc. where appropriate) using the template {{seeSynonyms}} (which displays something like: Template:SeeSynonyms), or using conventional wikitext syntax ().
  • The {{synonyms}} template, used to render per-sense synonyms directly beneath definitions, accepts links, which should be placed after any specific synonyms (e.g. )
  • Especially for Thesaurus entries featuring mostly synonyms, it is good to add a link to the Thesaurus entry from all the mainspace entries for the synonyms, so that the user knows that there is a Thesaurus entry when visiting the mainspace.

Wikidata

Wikidata with its subclass and instance of relationships does some of the job of the thesaurus, and is hugely more complete. However, it is not suited for extensive synonym lists and it does not make it convenient to browse hyponymic networks, only supporting easy navigation from an item to its superclass. Some of its subclass stuctures seem needlessly complex and overengineered.

Roget-MICRA thesaurus

Roget's 1911 thesaurus with MICRA supplementation is available here:

The appendix has a search box and conveniently features links to mainspace.

A search box for convenience:


Moby Thesaurus II

Moby Thesaurus II is available here:

The appendix has a search box and conveniently features links to mainspace.

A search box for convenience:


Identity

The current title of the project is "Thesaurus" and "The Languages of David J. Peterson Thesaurus". Before mid-2017, it was "Wikisaurus" Alternatives considered include "Wikithesaurus". In the past, WikiSaurus spelling with capital 'S' must have existed at some point.

Online thesauri

Public domain

Free as in "freedom"

Proprietary

Other

  • None listed.

Statistics

Statistics about the thesaurus entries, as of Oct 2022:

  • Entries: 4,833
  • English entries: 2,487
  • Chinese entries: 1,900
  • Other-language entries: 446
  • Entries containing colon (:) in title: 29

Page views

Anatomy entries get a fair amount of page views, as is expected. But they are not alone; other entries with non-trivial page views include Thesaurus:pros and cons and Thesaurus:child.[3]

Recent changes

Shortcuts

See also

Subpages

Highlighted subpages:

Project subpages:

To do

Things to do:

All entries

Lists of all Thesaurus entries:


Index

An index to this page:

References

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