TheSage English Dictionary and Thesaurus

When you don’t know the meaning of a word, you can turn to TheSage for help. When you need an anagram for a word, you can once again turn to TheSage for help. When you need to find a definition, semantically similar words, look up info online, perform a phonetic wildcard search, you’ve guessed it, you can turn to TheSage for help. You see, this is a properly good English dictionary and thesaurus that has powerful functionality to offer – for the awesome price of free, mind you.

The application can be installed on a 32 or 64-bit edition of Windows XP, Vista, or 7. All you have to do is download an executable, run it, then click through a simple setup wizard. The aforementioned setup wizard will ask you to choose between a Standalone Installation (includes the application’s core files, documentation, Firefox and Chrome extensions), a Custom Installation, and a Portable Installation. No matter which one you choose, you will be done with the whole thing in very little time.

An introduction to the application’s functionality takes up the main part of the interface. Above it there’s a text box you can use to enter the word that’s giving you trouble. In the upper right hand corner there are buttons to access the Options menu, the application’s documentation, the About dialog, to minimize the application and to make TheSage the top most window. Hidden in the left hand side is a menu that allows you to access multiple search options.

Enter word in the aforementioned text box and TheSage will look it up and present a definition to you. You can read that definition to familiarize yourself with the word or you can let TheSage read it out loud to you. On top of that, you can look up a word’s semantic similarity, look up info about it on Wikipedia and more. Thanks to the powerful functionality offered by TheSage, you will have easy access to detailed definitions, a detailed collection of usage examples, numerous phonetic transcriptions, anagram search, and lots of relationships between definitions (synonyms, antonyms, and so on).

As mentioned above, TheSage is a free application. Please note that the application’s development requires substantial funding. Cons:
None that I could think of.