Wiktionary:Thesaurus
This is the main project page of Wiktionary Thesaurus, a Wiktionary 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.
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Please contribute your own Thesaurus entries, or add to the existing Thesaurus entries.
Purpose[edit]
- Purpose:
- To help people find words that they
- can't recall or
- don't know
- To help people explore the network of words
- To help people find words that they
- Semantic relations:
- Synonymy – same or similar meaning
- Antonymy – opposite meaning
- Hyponymy – narrower meaning, subclass
- Hypernymy – broader meaning, superclass
- Being an instance – being an example of the class, set membership
- Meronymy – part, such as wheel of a car
- Holonymy – whole, such as car of a wheel
- Users:
- Writers
- Managers
- Contributors to wikis
- Bloggers
- Writers of love letters
- Journal writers
The purpose of Wiktionary 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, 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 Wiktionary Thesaurus is its Wiktionary integration—it links to and is linked from Wiktionary.
Models[edit]
Candidate model thesauri include Roget's thesaurus, and, say, The Penguin Thesaurus. The two follow different design principles.
Multilingualism[edit]
English Wiktionary Thesaurus is multilingual; it contains entries for other languages than English[1]. Such entries include Thesaurus:příbuzný and Thesaurus:juoppo. An alternative naming of the entries is "Thesaurus:cs:příbuzný" and "Thesaurus:fi:juoppo", in part modeled on the naming of topic categories. Yet another alternative is "Thesaurus:cs:relative" and "Thesaurus:fi:drunkard" using English headwords prefixed by the language.
Discussions:
- Thesaurus_talk:juoppo
- Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2009/March § Wikisaurus - non-English entries
- Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2017/August § Disambiguate WS (thesaurus) entries by language
Languages that have at least one Thesaurus entry include Arabic: Thesaurus:صار, Azerbaijani: Thesaurus:yaxşı, Chinese: Thesaurus:舒適, Czech: Thesaurus:příbuzný, Danish: Category:Danish thesaurus entries, Finnish: Thesaurus:juoppo, French: Thesaurus:chat, German: Thesaurus:sehr, Hindi: Thesaurus:मनुष्य, Japanese: Thesaurus:レストラン, Korean: Thesaurus:한글, Polish: Thesaurus:gruchot, Portuguese: Thesaurus:duradouro, and Telugu: Thesaurus:కుక్క.
Formatting[edit]
Formatting is specified and discussed at:
Example entries:
- Thesaurus:error – mostly synonyms
- Thesaurus:aircraft – mostly hyponyms
- Thesaurus:food – a complex entry
- Thesaurus:beverage – hyponyms grouped semantically using
{{ws ----}}
as separator - Thesaurus:animal sound – hyponyms grouped semantically with text labels
Inclusion[edit]
The inclusion criteria for Thesaurus entries are the same as those for the mainspace: Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion.
Additionally, 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.[2]
Templates[edit]
Lists of templates:
Templates:
Template | Example | Note | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
The second entry is a lazy one. The third one shows no tooltip, but also does not make it clear that one is missing. | |||||
|
To be put around a list of {{ws}} entries. Currently formats the list as a 3-column one.
| ||||
|
Entered at the very top of the entry. When without parameter, determines the headword automatically. | ||||
{{R:Roget 1911|beauty}}
|
“beauty” in Roget's Thesaurus, T. Y. Crowell Co., 1911. | ||||
{{ws sense|glad; in a good mood}}
|
Sense: glad; in a good mood | Used after the third level heading for the part of speech. |
Mainspace[edit]
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: See Thesaurus:error), or using conventional wikitext syntax (''See also'' [[Thesaurus:error]]
). - The
{{synonyms}}
template, used to render per-sense synonyms directly beneath definitions, acceptsThesaurus:
links, which should be placed after any specific synonyms (e.g.{{synonyms|en|goof|blunder|Thesaurus:error}}
) - 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.
Identity[edit]
The current title of the project is "Thesaurus" and "Wiktionary 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[edit]
Public domain
- 1911 version of Roget's Thesaurus hosted by Project Gutenberg
- Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward - public domain
- Dictionary at datasegment.com - includes Moby thesaurus in its search results
Free as in "freedom"
- http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ - licensed under [1]; see also Wiktionary:Princeton WordNet
- https://en-word.net/ - licensed under [Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 License]; see also Github [[2]]
Proprietary
- http://thesaurus.reference.com
- http://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus
- http://www.bartleby.com/62/
- http://www.visualthesaurus.com/
- http://encarta.msn.com/thesaurus__/thesaurus.html
- http://www.fao.org/agrovoc/
- http://www.smartdefine.org
- http://www.powerthesaurus.org
Other
- None listed.
Recent changes[edit]
Shortcuts[edit]
- WT:WSI - a Thesaurus index.
- WT:WS - to this page.
- See also Wiktionary:Shortcut
See also[edit]
- Wiktionary:Semantic relations
- Synonym (P5973) property talk of Wikidata:Lexicographical data
Subpages[edit]
Highlighted subpages:
Project subpages:
- /Format - how to format a Thesaurus entry
- /Purpose - on the purpose of the Thesaurus
- Wiktionary:Thesaurus considerations - Original discussion about the project.
- /Improvements 1 - Its talkpage has a discussion from July 2008.
- /Improvements 2 - Discussion about the direction and overall project.
- /Requested entries - A lot of words with candidate lists of synonyms that can be used as a starting point for creation of entries. The size of the page: 700 words. --Dan Polansky 11:34, 5 September 2008 (UTC)
To do[edit]
Things to do:
- /Requested entries - add requested entries
- Requests for cleanup - clean up entries with formatting and other problems
- Appendix:Roget's thesaurus classification - add entries using Roget's thesaurus as a checklist and model
All entries[edit]
Lists of all Thesaurus entries:
Discussion[edit]
Discussions about Thesaurus are scattered across various pages. In the future, they should better take place in Beer Parlour, a general policy discussion room.
Pages with discussions:
- Wiktionary:Thesaurus considerations -- starting in 2002 and 2003, getting more traffic in 2004, with most discussion ended by the end of 2006
- Wiktionary:Wikisaurus/Improvements 1 -- created in February 2005, and stopped immediately; a surge of activity appeared in July 2008
- Wiktionary:Wikisaurus/Improvements 2 -- created in April 2006, active in May 2006 and then stopped; a surge of activity appeared in May 2008
For more discussions, see #Beer parlour.
Beer parlour[edit]
Discussions about Thesaurus at Beer parlour:
The following list is highly incomplete.
- 2005
- WikiSaurus category - March 2005 - 750 words
- 2006
- Wiktionary:Project_-_WikiSaurus_improvement_1 - April 2006
- Template_WikiSaurus-link - April 2006
- Wikisaurus_cleanup - April 2006 - 2800 words
- Thesaurus:new - May 2006 - 45 words
- WikiSaurus_proposal - May 2006 - 172 words
- Pushing for the definitive WikiSaurus name and namespace - May 2006 - 2200 words
- Stop me if this sounds_familiar - Oct 2006 - on semiprotecting Wikisaurus entries - see also the vote
- 2007
- ...
- Necessary_tidying_up_of_Wikisaurus_templates. - May 2007
- Wikisaurus_changes - May 2007 - on inclusion criteria including the option of 30,000 Google hits - 650 words
- ...
- 2008
- January-April 2008 : none found.
- WikiSaurus - May 2008 - a proposal of deletion of Wikisaurus
- Thesaurus_flunky - May 2008
- Specific_Universal_Changes_in_Wikisaurus - June 2008
- Yet_Another_Interminable_Discussion_about_Wikisaurus - July 2008
- Category:Wikisaurus - July 2008
- Wikisaurus at cross purposes - July 2008 - including whether all items in WS entries should link to WS or to WT - many participants
- Wikisaurus alteration - Sep 2008 - about the appearance of
{{ws}}
. - Moby Project - Sep 2008 - on importing Moby II thesaurus into Wikisaurus
- 2009
- Wikisaurus - non-English entries - Mar 2009
- on using the Wikisaurus - Apr 2009
- Wikisaurus - inclusion criteria - Nov 2009
- 2010
- Proposed Wikisaurus style changes - Jan 2010
- International Wikisaurus - Jan 2010
- Vote on deleting Template:Wikisaurus-link- Jan 2010
- Poll: Deleting "/more" pages from Wikisaurus - Sep 2010
- Planned vote: Deleting Wikisaurus slash-more pages, Oct 2010; see also the vote
- A synonym of itself in Wikisaurus, Oct 2010
- "See also" in Wikisaurus, Nov 2010
- 2013
- Wikisaurus and attestation - Sep 2013 - and the vote
- 2014
- Redirects in Wikisaurus - Mar 2014
- 2017
See also search for "Wikisaurus" in the archives of Beer parlour.
Index[edit]
An index to this page:
- All entries - see #All entries, Wiktionary:All Thesaurus pages, and Category:Thesaurus
- Example entries - see #Formatting
- Layout - see #Formatting
- Logo - see #Identity
- Monitoring - see #Recent changes
- Recent changes - see #Recent changes
- Requested entries - see /Requested entries and #Subpages
- Spelling - see #Identity
- Title - see #Identity