Following Macmillan Dictionary, we can find out that word list can be used together with the preposition of (example sentence: A list of the world’s richest people). We are looking for a collection in reverse form. That is a list of common words associated with a specific preposition (e.g., of) to the left. So far, … Read more
Are there resources to help me keep away from latinate when I write? Preferably, they would let me trade latinate words for older, better words. A thesaurus might help (or better, a good dictionary with information on etymology, combined with a thesaurus—which is the combination I used to find that “keep away” could replace “avoid”), … Read more
I’m a bit confused as to why some thesauruses, e.g. Oxford Dictionaries, state that puppy is a synonym of dog. To me they are related but not a synonym. dog hound, canine, mongrel, cur, tyke; male dog; bitch, pup, puppy, whelp informal: doggy, pooch, mutt Australian informal: mong, bitzer ENGLISH THESAURUS Can anyone shed some … Read more
As an exercise, I am going thorough I paper I wrote and trying to replace all (or most) adjectives in the form of “very + adjective” with a word. I feel that if done good this would greatly improve my writing. For example “very small ” -> “negligible” . Of course the correct substitution depends … Read more
I recall there is an online service that lets you search for a word (like “sky”) and shows you sentences that use that word but you can filter by part of speech (the noun “sky” vs. the verb “to sky”). Any suggestions? Answer Google NGrams: sky_VERB for sky as a verb (I expect that is … Read more
I want a word but I don’t want to have to use “more successful”. I don’t consider successfuler a suitable attempt in the context I want to use it in either. I think this is called a comparative adverb, but I don’t know of a thesaurus of comparative adverbs. Can anyone point me to that? … Read more
Is there something like a thesaurus that offers terms more often used in the past? For instance, I beg you would, in Shakespearean times, be prithee, while chicks during the 1920s would be dolls. Meta: Seeing how the question on a thesaurus with archaic and obsolete words and several other thesaurus-related questions have been closed, … Read more
When I taught myself English a long time ago I used (alongside Assimil’s L’anglais sans peine and the BBC’s Calling all beginners) a series of four books, Essential English authored by C.E. Eckersley and published by Longmans. It was an impressively good set of boooks, with plenty of grammatical and cultural explanations, presented in a … Read more
Is there any dictionary that shows the decomposition of each word into these three parts, if application at all? For instance, “incapable” is divided into prefix “in”, root “cap”, and suffix “able”. Thanks in advance. Answer Most of them if they give an etymology. Taking your examples, the OED gives: medieval Latin incapābilis, < in- … Read more
As you can see from this NGram, the total number of words in the indexed English corpus that were nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, determinants, pronouns, adpositions, numerals, conjunctions, or particles was around 83%. This could be an infrastructure or programming issue, but assuming it’s not, what possible explanation is there that this number is not … Read more
