It is really difficult to determine how important internet has been for linguists in our age: very important, awfully important, overwhelmingly important… Probably it will never be exactly pondered the astounding amount of language resources available on line. Never before the students, the scholars, the writers both the amateurs and professionals, have had so many dictionaries, so many thesaurus, so many corpus and data at their disposal.
We could probably be surfing on the net 24 hours a day for a whole year and we wouldn´t stop finding new interesting word related places. My most recent discovery has been a device called Visual Thesaurus. The site defines itself as “an interactive dictionary and thesaurus which creates word maps that blossom with meanings and branch to related words”, and the New York Times describes it as “imaginative, ingenious and fanciful”, adjectives that I subscribe enthusiastically.
Some ago I said that the English speaking world pays much more attention to their language that we, the Spanish speaking people, do. Everyday I´m more persuaded of it. We are at a distance that can be measured only in astronomical units. I would love to have in Spanish language something similar to Visual Thesaurus.
The only flaw I can see in it is that you have to pay for use it, but nothing´s perfect! Take a look at it, at least to peek is for free!
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