14 DAY TRIAL // Everybody gets smart these days and each of us has a good opinion of himself or herself. But whenever we hear an unfamiliar word, we just nod our heads and agree with our interlocutor, not having any idea what s/he is meaning by that. I say enough with that. We should know what others are talking about!!!
Communication is everything in a society. It creates wars, peace, makes us live and perform better. All is needed are some little words. And no matter your opinion, communication is always present, and we convey messages even when we sleep or just look at a picture.
Today's review will be about a software that explains words. Not a dictionary, but a thesaurus. I've already explained the difference between a dictionary and a thesaurus, so I will just place a link to that review.
Its name is The Sage and the developer is Sequence Publishing. The size of the witty application is 7.87MB, so I imagine that storing it on your hard drive won't be a problem. The fact that the release is freeware is a proof that some good things do come for free.
When I first opened the application, I was surprised to see that the interface was given enough attention so as not to look like a software designed for a Windows 98 platform. I was used with more deficient in beauty similar softwares, but this one really impressed me with its looks.
Once you type in a word to look for, you have two options available: Wildcard and Anagram. You all understand the terms of wildcard and anagram, but I will explain them anyway. A wildcard is a term you are unsure of its spelling. The anagram of a word is rearranging its letters so that it gives different words with different meanings.
The complexity of the results astounded me. I am not talking about the result of the anagram, as it is just a list of the possible anagrams of the word. I am talking of the Wildcard results. First, there is the lemma (the word you are looking for), the synonyms and hypernyms (the more generic word), the thesaurus will display the part of speech that word is, and only after that, will it come up with the definition that explains it.
In some other cases, the software will also provide you some examples with the looked up word. It will show the use in different situations by placing it in sentences.
The History button displays all the searched items and if you double click one of them, the software will take you to the results window. The best part is that the application records if you looked for the anagram or just the definition. The same word can be found twice in the history window, but one of them will begin with the ">" sign. That means that the user searched the anagram of that word.
Wildcards support spelling like "br?n" and the program will display a list of words for you to choose from.
You will be surprised to find out that the software has an Options menu. And a pretty sharp one. It allows you to change the appearance of the lookup tree, the colors of the little squares in the lookup tree (they call them semaphores as they look like the stop lights in traffic). This menu will mainly permit the user to change the aspect of the query results.
In the History tab you have a chance to erase your traces and delete the history sessions, or just enable the software to delete it automatically upon exiting. The more general options of the application include auto clearing the input area, start the software minimized in system tray, sending the program to system tray when pressing the "Close" button, or set it to start on Windows' boot.
The Good
An impressive software in the educational category. The database is almost up to date, because a language is continually changing and growing.
The result tree is a good feature as it facilitates the access to the information about the words.
The Bad
It's a pity the software has not been updated for a while. I wouldn't like it to cool down. I would also have liked if it had an option that allowed the user to enrich it with more definitions and words.
The Truth
I really liked this software and I will continue to use it together with Mobysaurus. It is a great application to give your kids to use whenever they need a definition to a word and it will also enrich their vocabulary.
It is easy to use and you won't even feel it running on your computer as it uses only about 5MB of RAM. The About menu awaits you with something more than information about the software. Check it out!
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
