Many years ago, I attended a writing class with the incomparable Melanie Crowder that completely changed the way I wrote. That class opened my eyes to an entire new world, and at the time it was so far over my head—and was so brilliant—that I knew I was getting graduate-level craft techniques when my writing skill set was still somewhere at the high school level.
Melanie talked about word choice. Specifically, she talked about dialogue. What stuck with me was the insight that a character’s words should reflect their personality. A shy, withdrawn character would use softer sounds and would avoid using words with a lot of hard K and G sounds.
After that class, a thesaurus—first Roger’s, then the online Merriam Webster’s—became an essential part of my writing practice. I love searching for just the right word, with all its nuance and complexity of meaning. I’ve found that that those word searches have the added benefit of being able to integrate words with poetic devices, like alliteration, assonance, and consonance.
But for writers, a generic thesaurus often isn’t enough. One of my favorite thesaurus-like resources has been linguistic professor Beth Levin’s ENLISH VERB CLASSES AND ALTERNATIONS: A PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION.While I can not tell you what a verb alternation is, I do know that Prof. Levin’s lists are priceless. For my upcoming picture book DAWN CHORUS: PROTECTING BIRDSONG AROUND THE WORLD (Holiday House, 2026), I featured a variety of endangered birds, and was searching for a whole lot of different words that described the emergence of early morning birdsong. And the list I needed was there, under “Verbs of Sound Emission.”
This is a book that you can open to any page and find unexpected gems. There’s “Verbs of Social Interaction” with subclasses for meet, marry, correspond, talk and chitchat, or “Verbs of Removing” with its subclasses of remove, banish, clear and wipe, or “Verbs of Gestures and Signs Involving Body Parts” its wink and crane and curtsey subclasses. Writers often strive to reduce their use of adverbs, and make their writing more crisp and descriptive. In Latin, thesaurus” means “storehouse” or “treasury”, and this book is indeed a treasure.
Another treasure that should be on every writer’s shelf is Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglist’s best-selling THE EMOTION THESAURUS. For each emotion, there’s a list of physical signals and behaviors, internal sensations, mental responses, long-term responses, signs that the emotion is being suppressed, other emptions that this might escalate or de-escalate to, and associated verbs.
Ackerman and Puglist didn’t stop with emotions. Under their Writers Helping Writers® brand, they have an entire thesaurus collection with the goal of help writers master description and learn to show, instead of telling. There are thesauruses for settings and conflict, for occupations and character traits, and emotional amplifiers and wounds. And for those who would rather search online, all their works are available via One Stop for Writers. You can check it out with a two-week free trial, or sign up for monthly, six-month or yearly rates (currently $11, $60, or $105).
Another phenomenal resource for finding just the right word is the University of Miami at Ohio’s collection of collective nouns. This list is amazing not just for its depth, but for the fact that it includes when the word was first used (and the spelling at the time). A dissimulation of birds, for example, has been in use since the 1560s.
And, of course, there is the OneLook Dictionary and Thesaurus, a program that you can either use separately or install to work with your Google Docs. What I love about the OneLook Thesaurus is that it provides synonyms by part of speech, so if you were starting with a verb and looking for a relative adjective or noun, this one is great. For the poets, it will also restrict the lists by meter. For example, if you start with the word “soar” and wanted a related trochaic word (stressed, unstressed, unstressed beats), it might suggest “towering”.
Two thesaurus-related books for kids are also on my shelves: Tara Lazar’s ABSURD WORDS and Jen Bryant’s THE RIGHT WORD: ROGET AND HIS THESAURUS, illustrated by Melissa Sweet.
ABSURD WORDS is subtitled “A Fun and Hilarious Vocabulary Builder for Future Word Nerds” and in it, Lazar has created word squads with groups that share something in common. Not surprisingly, one of my favorite squads is “Once Upon a Time.” It’s words that have origins in stories—words like Pollyanna, jabberwocky, Lilliputian, and quixotic. The whole thing is just a delight to pick up, turn to any page, and read.
Jen Bryant’s THE RIGHT WORD is a nonfiction picture book that tells the story of young Peter Mark Roget, who made lists of related words in his desire to use the perfect word. Like many writers, I am indebted—and so, so grateful—for his work.