I don’t do this very often in this space (links to interesting sites/articles go on the right) but I came across a site today that I am simply wetting my pants about. It’s nothing too special, and I’m almost kicking myself in the ass because I didn’t find it before now, but still…it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.

You know how when, sometimes, you’re trying to think of a word and it’s just not coming? You have the general idea of the word, even a decent spur-of-the-moment list of its synonyms, but you can’t figure it out. Usually, the way to find your word is to go the thesaurus, find one of the synonyms you’ve thought of, and then work backwards from there.

But today, I’m sitting here, trying to think of the word that describes the quotations that come at the beginning of some books, and instead of my mind remembering about the thesaurus process, I somehow get fixated on the idea of a “reverse lookup dictionary.”

Now, I’ve never heard of such a thing. In the days of hardcover books, it just wouldn’t make any sense. I mean, how would you arrange such a thing? Alphabetical doesn’t work. I guess you could arrange it by general concept (as some thesauri do), but anyway you arrange it, it’s not going to be what the technology folk calls user friendly.

But if you get rid of the concept of the book and just have a database to which the computer can match any queries, then the concept of a reverse lookup dictionary starts to make a lot of sense.

I’ve been looking for such a thing for a long time, I guess, but I just had no idea what to call it. For some reason, today it hit me. A quick Google search later, and there it was.

So, today’s site of the day is OneLook’s Reverse Dictionary.