Comment by margalabargala
19 days ago
Paper thesauruses (thesaurai?) won't have prefixes like "very" in their pages.
Furthermore, even if we allow "very useful", that's a far cry from "admitting a large number of uses". The latter requires a search engine to properly map.
Which they've been good at for a while. You could have googled "word meaning admitting a large number of uses" back in 2018 and gotten good answers.
My point is, the tools you've linked to are useful/versatile, but it's not the thesaurus that makes them so useful, it's the digital query engine built on top of the thesaurus.
Even if I don't know the word "versatile", I can go from the phrase "admitting a large number of uses" to the phrase "very useful". The original point I made (before I discovered OneLook Thesaurus) described the effectiveness of a procedure that was just manually looking things up in databases, as one might do in a paper thesaurus. (I could print out Wiktionary and WordHippo in alphabetical order, buy a Cambridge Thesaurus and some bookshelves, and perform the procedure entirely offline, with only a constant factor slowdown.)