[massysett]

We have what I've dreamed of for years: the reverse dictionary.

Put in a word and see what it means? That's been easy for at least a century. Have a meaning in mind and get the word? The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was. Now it's always available.

[astrashe2]

This is a great description of how I use Claude.

[9rx]

> Have a meaning in mind and get the word? The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was.

There was another way: Make one up.

That is what the people you read from/talked to did before relaying it to you.

[vaylian]

If you want to establish a new word, you need to make sure that the word also sticks in common use. Otherwise the word will not hold its own meaning. For existing concepts it's much better to use the words that have already been established, because other people can look them up in a dictionary.

[terminalbraid]

> Now it's always available.

And often incorrect! (and occasionally refuses to answer)

[NeutralCrane]

Is it? I’ve seen AI hallucinations, but they seem to be increasingly rare these days.

Much of the AI antipathy reminds me of Wikipedia in the early-mid 2000s. I remember feeling amazed with it, but also remember a lot of ranting by skeptics about how anyone could put anything on there, and therefore it was unreliable, not to be used, and doomed to fail.

20 years later and everyone understands that Wikipedia may have its shortcomings, and yet it is still the most impressive, useful advancement in human knowledge transfer in a generation.

[dgacmu]

It is! But you can then verify it via a correct, conventional forward dictionary.

The scary applications are the ones where it's not so easy to check correctness...

[0x696C6961]

Sure, but it's easy to check if it's incorrect and try again.

[joquarky]

Your comment does not align with my experience.

Garbage in, garbage out still applies.

[cess11]

"The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was"

Did you have trouble with this part?

[xeromal]

This seems like a hostile question.

[wizzwizz4]

The "reverse dictionary" is called a "thesaurus". Wikipedia quotes Peter Mark Roget (1852):

> ...to find the word, or words, by which [an] idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed

Digital reverse dictionaries / thesauri like https://www.onelook.com/thesaurus/ can take natural language input, and afaict are strictly better at this task than LLMs. (I didn't know these tools existed when I wrote the rest of this comment.)

I briefly investigated LLMs for this purpose, back when I didn't know how to use a thesaurus; but I find thesauruses a lot more useful. (Actually, I'm usually too lazy to crack out a proper thesaurus, so I spend 5 seconds poking around Wiktionary first: that's usually Good Enough™ to find me an answer, when I find an answer I can trust it, and I get the answer faster than waiting for an LLM to finish generating a response.)

There's definitely room to improve upon the traditional "big book of synonyms with double-indirect pointers" thesaurus, but LLMs are an extremely crude solution that I don't think actually is an improvement.

[yunwal]

A thesaurus is not a reverse dictionary

[dgacmu]

Really?

"What's a word that means admitting a large number of uses?"

That seems hard to find in a thesaurus without either versatile or multifarious as a starting point (but those are the end points).