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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/3707
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Is there a place or a type of dictionary or even a good method, that instead of searching for a word, I can search for a meaning and get more words that have similar idea or meaning?

For example, if I had an idea in my mind say, "walk up the bus". I can then search for this idea and then get words such as board, hop on, alight, etc. I thought that if there is such a tool, it would be very helpful in my writing because sometimes, I need to look for a particular word to describe or add effects to an action or event but I couldn't. The thesaurus works but say in the example given, if I entered "walk" into the thesaurus, it may give me other words like stroll, stride, etc and not what I really want because the keyword "bus" isn't considered in the search. Similarly, if there is such a tool, instead of walk, I could search "walk hastily", that could give me words that describe the action of walking quickly.

Original score: 6