Wiktionary:Thesaurus

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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.

New to Thesaurus?

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

Purpose[edit]

Chunked purpose
  • Purpose:
    • To help people find words that they
      • can't recall or
      • don't know
    • To help people explore the network of words
  • 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:

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, Polish: Thesaurus:gruchot, Portuguese: Thesaurus:duradouro, and Telugu: Thesaurus:కుక్క.

Formatting[edit]

Formatting is specified and discussed at:

Example entries:

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

THESAURUS

beer
Entered at the very top of the entry. When without parameter, determines the headword automatically.
{{comment-link}} Deprecated in Thesaurus. Preferred template: {{ws}}
{{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:

  • Place * See also Thesaurus:headword to the "Synonyms" section, or to the "Hyponyms" section if the Wikisaurus entry contains mainly hyponyms.
  • 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

Free as in "freedom"

  • None listed.

Proprietary

Other

Recent changes[edit]

Shortcuts[edit]

See also[edit]

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.
  • /Format - Discussion about the formatting and general contents of a Thesaurus entry.
  • /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:

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:

For more discussions, see #Beer parlour.

Beer parlour[edit]

Discussions about Thesaurus at Beer parlour:

The following list is highly incomplete.

See also search for "Wikisaurus" in the archives of Beer parlour.

Index[edit]

An index to this page:

References[edit]

  1. ^ Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2017-11/Restricting Thesaurus to English
  2. ^ Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2013-09/Wikisaurus and attestation
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