Word for word
It’s funny isn’t it? The expression we use to describe exactly the right word or phrase is a French one: ‘le mot juste.’ It was coined by Flaubert, a famous stickler for the precise and not known for slipping in the occasionally judicious English phrasing into his prose.
“Le mot juste”
Gustave Flaubert hunted for “The right word”
Even though English is the lingua franca (there, see: now we’re speaking Italian to describe our language) of international communications and, if you’re reading this, probably the language you use most, it can still be difficult to use.
The english language features over 600,000 words, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
English is generally considered to be the richest language in the world (the one with the most words, anyway - over 600,000 according to the OED), and so what’s your modus operandi for finding inspiration? Where do you go when you’re given carte blanche to come up with a bon mot or two of your own? Something that taps right in to the Zeitgeist, a phrase you can use as a deus ex machina to rescue your magnum opus and get you out of that linguistic cul de sac?
I don’t want to go on ad nauseam…
Try these to fuel your savoir-faire:
The Visual Thesaurus
To get the full experience it’s $20 a year, but you can use the free version. Type in your word and it’ll show you how all its synonyms are connected in a sort of web. You can pull the web around, collecting words together and finding different connections between them, you can elect to see just nouns, just adverbs etc and you can click on words to see the subsequent webs they create.
Try it – it offers a refreshingly different way of seeing word connections.
OneLook
This one’s amazing! It’s like Google for the dictionary. You can do all the things you’d expect: find meanings and synonyms, but you can also find words connected to themes, words that start or end with a specific series of letters (even words that contain those letters). You can find words that start with specific letters, are followed by a number of unknown letters and then end with more specific letters (ex?????ce, for example gives you expectance, experience, and expedience).
It also has a reverse dictionary – so if you know the definition but can’t remember the word, then this is the whatsitcalled or thingamajig for you.
Google Translate
Remember when this launched and you’d type in a phrase, translate it into another language and then translate it back to see how mangled it became? Well, it’s a much better translation engine now – as you’d expect – but you can still do a bit of back-and-forth with phrases to get nuance that can inspire you into alternative wording.
Ludwig
You can type whole sentences into Ludwig and it will “expand your linguistic horizons” by pulling examples from a wide range of publications. You can also download it and use it in tandem with Word etc.
Squibler
The “most dangerous” one, apparently.
There is a school of thought that a lot of us don’t actually know what we’re thinking until we say it/write it/articulate it somehow; that our argument develops with our sentences; our thoughts are marshalled by grammar.
There may well be some truth in that. Many of us prevaricate when writing, aiming for gravitas or simply a bona fide truth in our writing – often at the expense of fluency. So here’s Squibler…
You decide how long to write for (or how many words to type) and just go for it. If you stop for more than ten seconds, everything you’ve written disappears! It’s remarkable just how quickly that pressure turns into fuel.
Squibler is also a ‘supercharged AI writer for books, novels and screenplays that writes, edits and visualises your story’, but that’s for another day/article.
That’s it for now.
Pick up your pen, place your fingers on keyboard, clear your throat… and ready yourself to write.
You’ll be alright
