Nisus Thesaurus

(From August 2004; nowadays, Tiger has a built-in dictionary/thesaurus, finally catching it up to NeXT in at least one department ;)

One of the joys of writing on a computer is, of course, not having to take a typewriter with you or type things later from your longhand notebook. You can also bring gigabytes of music, text, just about anything. If you can get online, you have virtually any information you might need, instantly — or at least as fast as your Google-fu can manage.

Early in my writing life, back in the days when a “portable” computer meant lugging a Mac SE around, the one thing I would always have in my backpack, without fail, was a paperback dictionary and often a thesaurus as well. Assuming I’m online nowadays, a dictionary is available instantly by a variety of methods.

Of course, spell checking is available immediately in pretty much any application on OS X, but what if you can’t think of the word? And what if you can’t get online at all? Horrific thought, yes, but such are the vagaries of the early 21st century. Internet-based dictionary programs like OmniDictionary fail immediately. Now I could hack together a local dict server on my computer, but I don’t really feel like doing that. What is a writer to do?

Enter Nisus Thesaurus. Over 120,000 words in a handy interface, with both definitions and related words so you get the best of both a dictionary and a thesaurus. It also functions as a Service, so you can access its info in other applications. And it doesn’t need to be online to function.

The best feature of all? It’s a free download.