Visual Thesaurus

The Visual Thesaurus (http://www.visualthesaurus.com/) is an interesting website that creates a visual model of the entries that you would find in a thesaurus. It lists entries by nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs and color codes the listing in the visual representation. In order to get full use of the site one must either purchase the software or subscribe to the site. Subscription costs are $2.95 per month or $19.95 per year and the software (either by download or on CD) is $39.95. The site does have some free features such as a word of the day and a Spelling Bee feature where you can see how good of a speller you are. One of the features that I found interesting was the Vocab Grabber (which you need to be a subscriber to access). It allows you to take any text and paste it into a box and then "grab" vocabulary words from the text. You can then make word lists for study with your students. I think this site would be a good asset for teachers of English who may want to do something different with their students. If it is something you think you will only use occasionally, the price per month is very reasonable for the options the site has.