Roget's Strumpet

I just stumbled across this and it is totally fricking amazing. Online graphical dictionary and thesaurus.

If you heart vocabulary words as much as I do (and especially if you like amazing UI's) you have to go here!

Move stuff around, double-click on other words, try the random ones...

I'm obsessed. Truly.

Which also leads me to a realization, after having read a book review for THE MAN WHO MADE LISTS: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget’s Thesaurus, that there is a hidden joy in exploring a thesaurus that this interface magnifies. I'm a person who explores a thesaurus or a dictionary by chain-reaction... a strange story unfolds from that approach. Sometimes its a fragmented history of sorts, other times pure entertainment. Never a dull moment. Specifically, this excerpt from the review:

'Never quite intended as a book of synonyms (Roget thought there “really was no such thing,” given the unique meaning of every word), the Thesaurus was constructed as a crystal palace of abstraction, each of whose 1,000 lists pushes a reader, often antonymically, to the next, “certainty” leading to “uncertainty” leading to “reasoning” leading to “sophistry.” '