About a century ago every student used to have two reference books as a rule – one reference book was the English dictionary (usually Oxford English dictionary) for looking up the definitions of words and phrases. And the second reference book was a thesaurus (usually Roget’s thesaurus) for finding the root words and the synonyms. You can still buy these books (Roget’s Thesaurus first published in 1805 is still being sold in new editions), but when working on a computer you can make things a little faster by using a thesaurus software like WinThesaurus.
WinThesaurus is a small and simple thesaurus program for Windows. You can use it to lookup words, their synonyms and root words. You can type the full word if you know the correct spelling. But even if you do not know the correct or full spelling, you can use the wild cards to guess the word. For example, if you know that word starts with “appre” and ends with “n”, then you can type “appre*n” and WinThesaurus will match all the possible words to display them in the list.
You can select a word from the list of the root words or phrases and you can see all the synonyms in another list on the right side. You can select these synonyms and click on the Copy Selected Synonym button to copy them to the clipboard. If you want to find the synonyms for a word listed in the synonyms list, then you can click on the Find Roots with This Synonym button. It will then use that selected synonym as the root word and find synonyms for it.
Verdict: Even though not integrated in the system, WinThesaurus is very easy to use thesaurus software for Windows. It would have been better if it had a system wide hotkey to look for synonyms. It comes with 30,000 root words and over 2.5 million synonyms.
You can download WinThesaurus from http://roncharlton.org/.