About Panlexicon

Panlexicon is a unique thesaurus that provides a quicker and more intuitive process for finding the words you want.

What it does…

Like a standard Thesaurus, Panlexicon searches for synonyms and related words. But instead of providing a simple list of related words that you must laboriously read through, Panlexicon provides a “cloud” of answers. This cloud is designed to be quickly scannable: generic words are displayed larger, while more specific or distinctive words are displayed smaller.

By using our innate pattern recognition skills, Panlexicon’s unique format allows you to more quickly find an appropriate word.

In addition to just displaying lists of related words, Panlexicon allows you to dial in or drill down to the most appropriate answers. Once you have your initial set of related terms, clicking on another word in the cloud will combine that word into your original search and provide a new cloud with terms that are only related to those terms. You can also remove terms from the search by clicking them in the cloud.

By adding more terms to your query, you can refine your answer to your specific context or need.

How it works…

Panlexicon uses a unique search algorithm to find overlapping sets of related words and display them in the cloud. For each search, the Panlexicon scans through more than 100,000 root words with more than 2.5 million synonyms and related words. When searching, the algorithm compares the overlap of words between these groups and assigns each term a weight based upon how common it is within these groups. That weight is what determines its display characteristics within the cloud.

The lexicon and relatedness groupings for Panlexicon come from the the Moby Thesaurus from the Project Gutenburg library of free and public domain electronic texts. At its creation in 1996, the Moby Thesaurus was the largest thesaurus in the English language.

Who created it…

Panlexicon launched in July, 2007 as a collaboration between Ben Sheldon and Bec White.

Get in touch

For more information or inquiries, please email us at hello@panlexicon.com.