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Artha ~ The Open Thesaurus
Artha is a free cross-platform open-source English thesaurus that works completely off-line and is based on WordNet. It is released under the GNU General Public Licence version 2. Stable releases for download are currently available for GNU/Linux; it is tested on major Desktop Environments like GNOME, KDE, Xfce, etc.
Overview
Artha is a handy thesaurus that focuses on high usability, without trading off simplicity and ease of use. It has the following distinct features that increases its usability:
- WordNet - Artha harnesses the extensive & in-depth database provided by WordNet. Unlike other dictionaries which goes on-line for every single lookup, Artha works completely off-line; thanks to WordNet for its excellent and cognitive database.
- Hot key Lookup - When you press a pre-set hot key, after selecting some text on any window, Artha pops up with the selection's definitions looked-up.
- Regular Expressions Search - When a word is vaguely known I.e. the user is unclear of its spelling or when it's start/end alone is known or when the number of characters is known; one can speed up/narrow the search using regular expression to locate the particular word they have in mind.
- Notifications - Artha can show passive notifications (balloon tips) instead of the application's window popping up, so that you can continue what you were doing, uninterrupted. (like reading, writing, etc.)
- Suggestions - When a misspelled word is queried for, Artha gives you its near-match suggestions.
- Relative to Sense Mapping - Relative words like synonyms, antonyms, etc. that are displayed are many. You might not know to which sense/definition of a word does a relative map to. In Artha, when you select a relative, its corresponding definition is scrolled to and highlighted for easy comprehension.
For a given word, the possible relatives shown by Artha includes Synonyms, Antonyms, Derivatives, Pertainyms (Related Noun/Verb), Attributes, Similar Terms, Domain Terms, Entails (what verb entails doing), Causes (what a verb causes to), Hypernyms (is a kind of), Hyponyms (kinds), Holonyms (is a part of) and Meronyms (parts). To know more about each category of relatives, click on it for an explanation and example. Once launched, Artha sits on the system tray and looks for the pre-set hot key combination press. You can select some text on any window, and call Artha by pressing the key combo. Depending upon the option set, Artha with either pop-up with the word looked-up or will show a passive notification of the most important definition of the searched term, from the system tray.
Get Artha
See the Download page to get Artha for your platform.
Development
Artha is written in pure C using the GTK+ widget kit and GLib libraries, making it cross-desktop and cross-platform. It uses WordNet for its database corpus, libnotify for notifications and Enchant for spelling suggestions. It may be used as a advanced replacement for the proprietary software WordWeb in GNU/Linux environments. Currently different flavours of GNU/Linux are targeted. Porting to other UNIX-like systems (BSD, Solaris, etc.), Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows will commence soon.
