🧩 Tukuk-OS Thesaurus

Chosen synonym rings · sense by sense · notes on picking the right word

A thesaurus is only worth publishing if someone chose the words. These 40 entries are written the way a dictionary editor does it: every sense gets its own synonym ring, a plain gloss, and a note on when to pick which — the part the machine-generated lists never give you. Opposites are listed where English honestly has them.

💭 Feelings

Happy has eleven neighbours and they do not mean the same thing.

happy sad angry afraid tired calm excited lonely

📏 Sizes & Amounts

How much, how big, how fast — the measuring words and their exact edges.

big small many few full empty fast slow

👀 Looks & Qualities

What things are made of, apparently: beauty, mess, strangeness and their gradations.

beautiful ugly clever strange clean messy rare ordinary

🧠 Speech & Thought

Say, think, know, mean — the verbs of the head, sorted carefully.

say think know understand explain believe remember forget

🔨 Doing

Begin, break, change: the workshop verbs with all their tools labelled.

begin end make help show hide change break

Why only 40 words?

Because synonym dumps are a dime a dozen and judgement is not. Our own WordNet-based bank can list every synonym of every one of its 200,000 words — and the dictionary tool shows them — but a page that only says "big: large, huge, vast, great" has never helped anyone pick. These pages sort the ring by sense and say what each neighbour actually means in use. Anything outside the shelf is a 404 by design; new entries appear when they are written, not scraped.

Related shelves: dictionary (what words mean), rhymes (what they sound like), idioms (what phrases hide), Word of the Day.