Use meaning to find word

Where can I search for words using descriptive sentences? For example, now I’m looking for a word meaning «to purify (by hand) a quantity of grain and take away anything that isn’t good grain.»

How could I get words like that? I know it in my first-language, but I don’t have a classic version of it to use in automatic translators.

Maybe a search engine that uses content words from my description and offers words that could mean the same with their dictionary definitions. Nothing I’d tried in (translate.)google.com gave me the desired result.

Update:

An example dictionary that I use is (Oxford’s Word-Power Dictionary). It’s not for the purpose of the question but for clarification.

Oxford’s has a 3,000 word list of ‘bare-bone-essentials.’ It contains the most-used words in English and all of the grammatical operators. Ideally, these are the words necessary for a learner to use an English-English dictionary such as Oxford’s. The descriptions of words in Oxford’s rely on this list for definitions.

An electronic (web-based) dictionary for word-meaning-search should have a larger list (maybe 10,000) and use a thesaurus to down-level difficult words a user may use in the search then, using all content words in the search phrase, present a list of words whose definitions seem appropriate. Another regular dictionary may be used from there.

• Example:

  Search query: «to use hands to purify a quantity of grain taking away anything that isn’t good grain.»

  Content Words: «use-hands; purify; quantity-of-grain; taking-away; anything; isn’t; good-grain»

  Filtered: «use-hands; clean; quantity-of-seeds; take-away;anything; not-good-grain»

  Words: «1; 2; 3; 4» that use the content words to varying degrees.

And that’s a five minutes’ work!

PS. Sorry about the delay; connection problems…

driver – chauffeur — водитель — шофер
active — lively — активный — оживленный
sure – confident – уверенный — уверенный
laugh – giggle – смеяться — хихикать
known – familiar — известный — знакомый
strange — suspicious — странный — подозрительный
brown — tanned — коричневый — загорелый
The 1) chauffeur stopped the car.
He walked round and opened the car door for me. I could hear sounds of a 2) lively party — voices, music, laughter. When I knocked, the front door swung open and a man stood there. He was tall, and his face was 3) tanned, he’d obviously just got back from some tropical holiday or other.
‘I’m here to see Mr Charles,’ I said.
Without a word, he led me into the house. I heard a woman 4) was giggling as I followed him. Perhaps she thought my arrival was some sort of joke.
I waited alone in the small study. I’d been in it before, three weeks ago, so it was 5) familiar. Everything looked the same. But no — the picture of the 6) suspicious woman had gone. The wall was empty. How strange! At that moment the door opened, and a deep 7) confident voice said, ‘I’ve been expecting you.’
Шофер остановил машину.
Он обошел вокруг и открыл дверь машины для меня. Я мог слышать звуки оживленной вечеринки — голоса, музыка, смех. Когда я постучал, входная дверь распахнулась, и там стоял мужчина. Он был высок, и его лицо было загорелым, он, очевидно, только что вернулся из какой-то тропической страны или что-то еще.
«Я здесь, чтобы увидеть мистера Чарльза», сказал я.
Не говоря ни слова, он провел меня в дом. Я слышал, что женщина хихикала, в то время как я следовал за ним. Может быть, она думала, что мой приезд был какой-то шуткой.
Я ждал в одиночестве в маленьком кабинете. Я был в нем раньше, три недели назад, так что он был знакомым. Все выглядело так же. Но нет — картина подозрительной женщины исчезла. Стена была пуста. Как странно! В этот момент дверь открылась, и глубокий уверенный голос сказал: «Я ожидал тебя».

How do I use OneLook’s thesaurus / reverse dictionary?

OneLook lets you find any kind of word for any kind of writing.
Like a traditional thesaurus, you
can use it to find synonyms and antonyms, but it’s far more flexible.
Describe what you’re looking for with a single word, a few words,
or even a whole sentence. Type in your description and hit
Enter (or select a word that shows up in the autocomplete preview)
to see the related words.
You can order, filter, and explore the
words that come back in a variety of creative ways.

Here’s a video which
goes over some of the basics.

What are some examples?

Exploring the results

Click on any result to see definitions and usage examples tailored to your search,
as well as links to follow-up searches and additional usage information when available.
OneLook knows about more than 2 million different
words and expressions covering every topic under the sun.
Try exploring a favorite topic for a while and you’ll be surprised
how much new stuff there is to learn!

Ordering the results

Your results will initially appear with the most closely related word shown first,
the second-most closely shown second, and so on.
You can re-order the results in a variety of different ways, including
alphabetically, by length, by popularity, by modernness, by formality, and by other
aspects of style. Click the
box that says «Closest meaning first…» to see them all.
(Here’s a short video about sorting and filtering
with OneLook Thesaurus.)

Filtering the results

You can refine your search by clicking on the «Advanced filters» button
on the results page. This lets you narrow down your results to match
a certain starting letter, number of letters, number of syllables, related
concept, meter, vowel sound, or number of syllables.
Read more details on filters if you’re interested in how they work.

I’m only looking for synonyms! What’s with all of these weird results?

For some kinds of searches only the
first result or the first few results are truly synonyms
or good substitutions for your search word.
We highlight these results in yellow.
Beyond that, the results are meant to inspire you to consider similar words and adjacent
concepts. Not all of the results will make sense at first, but they’re all
connected with your search in some way. We’d rather give you too many options than
too few. If you’re unsure of a word, we urge you to click on
it to check its definitions and usage examples before using it in your Oscars
acceptance speech or honors thesis.

Other ways to access this service:

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Is this available in any language other than English?

The same interface is now available in Spanish at OneLook Tesauro
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How does it work?

We use a souped-up version of our own Datamuse API,
which in turn uses several lingustic resources described in the «Data sources» section
on that page. The definitions come from Wiktionary,
Wikipedia, and WordNet.
Here are some known problems
with the current system.

Much gratitude to Gultchin et al for the algorithm behind the «Most funny-sounding» sort order.

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Whenever you read extended texts in English, you will come across words which you do not know. Even native speakers will not know all
the words when they are reading. Your instinct is probably to look up the unfamiliar words
in a dictionary. If you do this for each word, however, it will take you a great deal of
time, and you may never reach the end of the text. You therefore need to develop strategies for dealing with unknown words. On this page, you can read about:

• how to deal with unknown words;
• using context to guess meaning;
• using prefixes, suffixes, and words roots.

There are also some activities to help you practice this area of EAP.

How to deal with unknown words

There are two questions to ask yourself whenever you meet an unfamiliar word. The first question is: ‘Do I need to know the meaning of the word?’
If not, you can keep reading and ignore the word. In order to answer this question, you need to make sure you have a clear
purpose in your reading. The second question you need to ask is:
‘Is an approximate meaning enough?’ If not, you need to look the word up
in a dictionary.

If the answer to both questions above is ‘yes’, it means you can guess what the word means then keep reading. Use the following to help you guess an approximate meaning:

• examine the immediate context of the word (i.e. the sentence in which it appears, and words which come before and after); pay particular attention to linking words;
• examine the wider context of the word (i.e. other sentences in the paragraph);
• look at the structure of the word (i.e. prefix, suffix, root).

The approach to unfamiliar words is summarised in the diagram below.

Do I need to know the meaning of the word?		Keep reading
Is an approximate meaning enough?		Use a dictionary
Use the following to help you guess the meaning: Immediate context (other words in the sentences) Wider context (other sentences in the paragraph) Prefix, suffix, root

Using context

When you guess the meaning of a word from context, you need to consider first the immediate context, i.e. the other words in the
sentence. If this is not enough, you need to use the wider context, i.e. sentences which come before and after the one which contains the word
you are guessing.

Immediate context

Consider the following sentence:

Although the company’s income from sales was higher than expected, its high costs in the form of salaries and other overheads put it in a
disadvantageous position.

Imagine the word you want to guess in this sentence is ‘disadvantageous’ (it doesn’t matter if you already know this word — this is just an example).
The immediate context of the word tells you the following:

• it is probably an adjective, because it comes before a noun (‘position’)
• it is probably negative, because it relates to ‘high costs’, which are not usually good for a company
• it is probably negative, because the sentence begins with ‘although’, a contrast marker,
  so the idea in the second clause contrasts with the first clause, which is positive (‘high income’ is good for a company)

A good guess for the word at this point would be ‘bad’. This is probably close enough for you to understand the main idea, and you would
be able to keep reading.

Wider context

Now consider the following paragraph:

Although the company’s income from sales was higher than expected, its high costs in the form of salaries and other overheads put it in a disadvantageous position.
This was one of the main reasons why the company
folded. This put all two hundred of its employees out of work.

Imagine the word you want to guess this time is ‘folded’ (this is a common word, but it has a special meaning in this sentence).
The immediate context of the word does not tell you much: it is clearly a verb, but it is difficult to determine more than this using only
the sentence it occurs in. To guess the meaning, you need to use the wider context, i.e. the sentences which come before and after.
Using these, you can tell the following:

• it is probably negative, because it is the result of the company’s ‘disadvantageous (bad) position’
• it is something which can happen to companies
• it resulted in all of the company’s employees being ‘out of work’

From this, you can guess that the word means something like ‘stopped’ or ‘stopped doing business’
(because no one works there any more). In fact, ‘to fold’ in this context means
‘(of a company etc.) to close because it is not successful’.

Using prefix, suffix, root

Again consider the following sentence:

Although the company’s income from sales was higher than expected, its high costs in the form of salaries and other overheads put it in a
disadvantageous position.

Imagine (again) that the word you want to guess in this sentence is ‘disadvantageous’. This word can be broken down into three components:
dis-, which is the
prefix; advantage, which is the
root; and -ous, which is the
suffix.
You can get the following information by studying the word in this way:

• it is probably an adjective, because it ends in -ous, which is a common suffix for adjectives
• it is probably negative, because it begins with a negative prefix dis-
• its meaning is probably opposite to the root of the word, advantage

As before, a good guess for the word at this point would be ‘bad’. Again, this would be close enough to allow you to understand the
main idea and keep reading.