Ah, but you miss the main use for a thesaurus: finding the correct spelling for words that elude you to such an extent that spell checkers cannot guess what you want. I can usually come up with at least one easily spelled synonym for the fugitive word. I do not anticipate that age will lessen the importance for me of this humble use. BTW, because of partial spelling-blindness I very much appreciate current-generation spell-checking software that highlights suspect words as I go. At the same time, as a law professor constantly dealing with strange case names and Latin oddities, I appreciate XyWrite's ability to give me a simple list of words it does not recognize in a file. Why isn't this feature demanded of EVERY word processor and text editor? It is so incredibly efficient to look through a list of unrecognized words and pick out the ones that are misspelled. In theory the on-screen marking of unknown words should provide the same efficiency, but in practice I have trouble preventing the context from providing a corrective for errors. |