Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: Elastic Search, WordNet, and note that Reverse Dictionary uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. Manley Lee's work on Dicebox made her a finalist for the Friends of Lulu 's Kimberly Yale Award for Best New Talent for 2003. The definitions are sourced from the famous and open-source WordNet database, so a huge thanks to the many contributors for creating such an awesome free resource. The comic, planned for four books totalling 36 chapters, is set in the space-travelling future and is primarily the story of one year in the lives of two women factory workers, Griffen Medea Stoyka and Molly Robbins. In case you didn't notice, you can click on words in the search results and you'll be presented with the definition of that word (if available). For those interested, I also developed Describing Words which helps you find adjectives and interesting descriptors for things (e.g. Predator), artist Carla Speed McNeil (Finder), and colorist Jenn Manley Lee (Dicebox) will launch a new story arc in their ongoing thrilling drama series NO MERCY this December. So this project, Reverse Dictionary, is meant to go hand-in-hand with Related Words to act as a word-finding and brainstorming toolset. That project is closer to a thesaurus in the sense that it returns synonyms for a word (or short phrase) query, but it also returns many broadly related words that aren't included in thesauri. I made this tool after working on Related Words which is a very similar tool, except it uses a bunch of algorithms and multiple databases to find similar words to a search query. So in a sense, this tool is a "search engine for words", or a sentence to word converter.
It acts a lot like a thesaurus except that it allows you to search with a definition, rather than a single word. The engine has indexed several million definitions so far, and at this stage it's starting to give consistently good results (though it may return weird results sometimes). For example, if you type something like "longing for a time in the past", then the engine will return "nostalgia". It simply looks through tonnes of dictionary definitions and grabs the ones that most closely match your search query.
The way Reverse Dictionary works is pretty simple.