Jisho.org Forum

I imagine with the underlying dictionary jisho currently uses, that's not really feasible. About the only thing one could do easily (well fairly easily if you don't mind a less-than-perfect solution), is look for words with the same English translation, which you can do yourself easily enough by using the E-J dictionary. However, you could use an existing online Japanese dictionary like

http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/

as a thesaurus (just check the 類語 option).

I agree that that would be nice :)

There's ways to augment the current data with thesaurus like features though. At some point in the distant future I'd like to get to it.

Wow thanks, That's promising :D it would be a dream come true! On to getting jisho global or something .. hehe

Posted By: Kim

[p]There's ways to augment the current data with thesaurus like features though. At some point in the distant future I'd like to get to it.[/p][span class=CommentSignature]I make Denshi Jisho.[/span]

Really? The programmer in me (who I'm sure is not nearly as good as the programmer in you) is interested in how you could implement that. Without using some sort of additional thesaurus database (which may be easily available, I don't know---though I also don't know what the current data looks like), I couldn't think of how one would do this in a simple manner besides searching for words that have overlapping text in their definitions.

The programmer in me has been thinking about it for a long time :)

It does require an external dataset, like WordNet, and automatic matching that can never be 100%. But I know that it's doable with fair accuracy from previous experience. Although applying it to edict/jmdict will surely be a bit trickier.

Ah, okay. I feel better. I couldn't see how it would be at all possible to do it without some sort of external thesaurus, but then again clever people have done lots of things I wouldn't think are possible :->