Find Examples of Using Word in This Web App
The thesaurus is a useful tool if you use it properly. If you know what you are doing, the thesaurus patronizes you if you find the right word for your particular game. But if you use synonyms without realizing their shadowy nature, you will look really speechless. You need to understand every word you use, otherwise people will scoff at your calligraphy.
God, it hurt.
If you want to go beyond your usual vocabulary and use a more colorful word, but are worried that it will read like the previous paragraph, try double-checking your word choice with the Ludwig web app.
Ludwig is a kind of dictionary that helps with translations and definitions, but it’s especially good for giving real-life examples of where a word or phrase is used. His examples are drawn from 22 well-known (and usually quality) sources, including the New York Times, The Independent, Forbes, and ScienceDirect.
Enter a word or phrase for examples of how it is used. You can also search for a phrase with a missing word, for example, search for a clue by * to see what might fit in the sentence.
Results for a given word or phrase are usually obtained from just three or four publications. Each result has a source title that leads back to the original article or page so you can read the quote in context. You don’t get results from random web pages like you do with a Google search.
These sources may “misuse” a phrase or word. You need to pay attention to which publication each quote comes from, and have some outside knowledge of which words are used most sparingly. The New Yorker, for example, is very careful to use, and you can’t go wrong with mimicking that. Forbes and the Independent are much weaker, and the New York Times is somewhere in between, depending on the material.
For example, look at how the phrase that prompts the question is interpreted in different publications. This awkward phrase, translated too literally from Latin into English centuries ago, was originally intended to provide a 360-degree argument . (For example, “evaporation of sweat lowers your body temperature because evaporation is a cooling process.”) But nothing in the phrase that begs the question clearly indicates this meaning. And over time it took on a second, more informal meaning: to raise the issue . Kind of overkill, but begging makes you sound like you’re reading books. So even reputable writers often use this new meaning, so often that many dictionaries include it as a second, “informal” meaning. This phrase means that let’s start the fight for linguistic prescriptivism . The point is that Ludwig gives you a good idea of how widely the literate world has embraced a phrase (or the specific meaning of that phrase).
Given the very limited corpus that Ludwig is looking for, you can also check your phrase on Google Books and Google Scholar . If you want to see how the phrase is used in your day to day life, try Twitter, but be aware that people are saying pretty stupid things on Twitter.
The language is alive and developing, technically all words and meanings are flexible, and many beautiful words and phrases were once considered “wrong”. But words are meant to communicate, and using a non-standard word will make a lot of people think you’re dumb. You don’t want to be caught writing “all intense goals,” “presumably,” or “I had free rein” in a term paper or cover letter.
With a free account, you can run eight Ludwig searches per day and receive 15 results each. If you become an active user, you will have to pay $ 6 per month or $ 48 per year for the unlimited version, which includes source filtering, additional results, and no ads. Or open your site in incognito mode, launch an ad blocker, and do some more free searches.
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