Shaxpir 4.5: Automatic Popup Thesaurus

NOTE: This article discusses Prosecraft.io, a linguistic analysis website we discontinued in August 2023. To learn more how things work today, check out our follow up article: How Shaxpir Does Linguistics

Hello, Shaxpirians! I’ve got exciting news for you…

Today, I’m thrilled to announce the release of Shaxpir 4.5 which includes a brand new linguistic feature, straight out of our R&D labs: an Automatic Popup Thesaurus.

To use it, just click on any word or phrase in your manuscript, then click the new Thesaurus button on the toolbar (or use the keyboard shortcut: Control-T on Windows, and Command-T on Macintosh), and Shaxpir will show you a list of conceptually-related words to choose from. Click on any of those choices to replace your original word with the suggested choice.

What makes this feature so compelling, though, is that it’s completely unlike any thesaurus you’ve ever used before. Traditionally, a thesaurus is an unchanging book created by lexicographers, documenting all the well-worn lists of synonyms and antonyms in their lexicon.

But the thesaurus we built for Shaxpir is completely different. We’ve spent more than two years building a gigantic linguistic model of literature (which you can explore at prosecraft.io).

We used A.I. algorithms to analyze more than 560 million words of fiction, from more than 5,800 books, written by more than 3,300 popular authors.

This new thesaurus is the latest product of our ongoing linguistic research.

We taught our machine-learning algorithms to recognize which kinds of words can be used in which kinds of contexts, by looking at the types of words and phrases that tend to occur within similar sentences and paragraphs.

For example, throughout our giant library of literature, the word “stars” is often used interchangeably with the word “constellations”, so our thesaurus suggests it as a potential replacement in this context. Which is what we’d expect from an ordinary thesaurus.

But the Shaxpir thesaurus also suggests a bunch of other associated words — words like “comets”, “horizon”, “moonlight”, and “shimmering” — which we’ve observed throughout our fiction library, being used in the same kinds of phrases and sentences as the word “stars”.

A typical thesaurus would exclude these words, since they’re not strictly synonyms or antonyms. But our algorithm includes them in its list of suggestions, because they’ve been proven — with hundreds of millions of observations, from real-world literature! — to be useful to real authors.

It’s like having the collective creative wisdom of thousands of published authors, and their combined vocabularies, at your side while you write.

Enjoy!

NOTE: For the computer scientists and linguists in the crowd, we built a “vector space model” using the top 28,000 words in our big corpus of English literature, and used word2vec to find the closest associations for each word. It’s an ongoing project, and it will get bigger and better over time, as we continue adding more novels to our library and refining our machine-learning algorithms.

The new Autmatic Popup Thesaurus is only available to paying subscribers of Shaxpir 4: Pro. As always, new users can sign up for a free 30-day trial, and existing users can upgrade for just $7.99 a month. If all the incredible professional features don’t change your writing life for the better, you can downgrade back to a free account, with Shaxpir 4: Everyone, whenever you want.

And of course, you can contact us anytime, if you have questions or suggestions or ideas. Just email support@shaxpir.com.

We’re always here to help.