I go over all kinds of text everyday. As part of an editor’s job is to make your writers look better, I’m consulting online dictionaries and thesauri all the time. I randomly came across TheSage’s English Dictionary and Thesaurus not too long ago and thought it sounded useful, but wondered if the time saved in convenience was really all that important. Turns out the portability and convenience of a local, offline dictionary/thesaurus is useful, but this program is so much more than that.

Yes, TheSage (you’re crazy if you think I’m typing out that entire boring name every time) has an extensive word and phrase bank and no need for an Internet connection, which is awesome, but it’s the interface and the other little tools that make this thing special. When you search for a word/phrase (which you can do by way of a general search or by letting the program try to discover the word you want as you type), the results appear in the right window in a tree structure. You get the word, its phonetic pronunciation, the class of the word and the definition, with each item next to a couple of colored boxes. It takes a bit to figure out what each box does, but once you’ve got it, you’ll be browsing synonyms, homonyms, hypernyms and holonyms. And I don’t even know what half of those things are!

TheSage gets even better with its pronunciation and anagram features. If you’ve got a word with a pronunciation you can’t figure out, just click the word balloon icon and a computer lady will read out the results of your search: word, definition and all. The computer voice is a little hard to understand sometimes (and more than a little terrifying), but you can pick out the word you’re looking for. I know how to pronounce Oaxaca now!

Finally, the anagram feature might not be as useful as the other tools in TheSage, but it is a fun little extra. I can make “achras” out of my name, which, of course, means “tropical trees having papery leaves and large fruit.” So… yeah.

So, if you’re a writer of any kind or a word geek, TheSage is fantastic. It’s 100% free, lightweight (it took up fewer system resources than AIM!) and incredibly extensive. It takes a minute to figure out what all the buttons and options do, and you may have to consult the documentation for a few things, but its worth it to be able to wield this literary tool.