Nisus Thesaurus is a simple educational application for Mac that offers a simple way to look for word explanations, synonyms, and antonyms. The program provides you with a straightforward interface, immediately offers you the results you need, and uses a small amount of CPU resources in the process.
After you enter a word within the search field, the app offers you a detailed explanation, the proper pronunciation, and lists of synonyms and antonyms for that word. You can copy the provided information to the clipboard and paste the text content into other running programs.
A good thing about working with this program is the fact that it communicates well with apps like TextEdit, Apple Mail, and Safari. If you're writing your thesis using TextEdit just right-click over the written word, select the "Look Up Selection In Thesaurus" option, and Nisus Thesaurus will then display the correspondent synonyms and antonyms.
A disadvantage of Nisus Thesaurus is that it occasionally fails to display the synonyms or antonyms for common words. For instance, I made a search for the word "beautiful" (a pretty common word in English language and with plenty of synonyms) and the program displayed only one antonym (ugly).
Nevertheless, the application if free of charge and it rarely fails to offer you the results you require. Therefore, I say it's worth trying.
v1.1 [Oct 13, 2011]
- Signed with an Apple Developer ID so it runs on Mac OS X 10.8 and Gatekeeper.
- Requires Mac OS X 10.6 (or later).
InstantTranslate makes it really easy to translate a selection of text in the application you are working in from one language to another language.
One World Dictionary by Ascendo is a leading multilingual reference tool for Apple desktops.
