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Roget's International Thesaurus
Electronic thesauruses are just not the same as this hardcover resources of the wonderful world of words I have sitting beside me on my desk. Sure electronic versions are quick, but it's like flying from one city to another - you miss all the stuff in between.
Roget's book is divided into two parts: you need to start in the index in the back and then flip back to the words at the front. If I am using WORD and look for a synonym for smelly, I get stinking, reeking, foul, malodorous, putrid, and fetid. All perfectly good words that will get the job done. In my Thesaurus I look at smell in the index and it gives me the options of scent or be fragrant or stink or detect. Then I flip to the words at the front and I can choose a verb or an adjective like fetid, nidorous, odorous, ill-smelling, smell-some, stenchy, whiffy, graveolent, mephitic, olid, rank, reeking, suffocating, unbearable, empyreumatic, repulsive, fulsome, noisome, and so on. Is a teenager's gym bag full of dirty football gear smelly or mephitic?
But wait, there's more. When you're in the pages up front, you can casually peruse, examine, scrutinize, scan, consider, review, pervestigate, indagate, inspect other words you just happen to be passing by. It's like driving through a one stop sign town in Georgia and stumbling upon the best fried chicken place in the country. You'd never find it from 35,000 feet up.
English is an incredible language. Too many great words get ignored.
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