If you need a word …

A com­bined Key­board Mae­stro and OSX Automa­tor action to access Prince­ton’s “Word­Net” data­base. Word­Net is a remark­able seman­tic net­work of words: not exact­ly a the­saurus but nonethe­less great for hunt­ing down the word you need.

Select a word in any Mac appli­ca­tion, hit the key­board trig­ger you select and the macros pop-up a win­dow with the cor­re­spond­ing entry in the Word­Net data­base.

Be sure to try click­ing on the “S:” link for seman­tic rela­tions. ‘Hyper­nyms’ (more gen­er­al terms), ‘hyponyms’ (more spe­cif­ic terms), ‘per­tainyms’ (per­tain­ing to…), ‘meronyms’ (name of the parts of a thing) and ‘sis­ter-terms’ are all good places to start explor­ing the net­work.