SynMap For Mac

SynMap is a handy Mac OS X educational application which enables you to view all the meanings of a word in a diagram. Using SynMap, you can interactively discover multiple word meanings and relations of over 145000 nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs.

The user interface of SynMap is very simple to learn and consists of a left sidebar to switch between the search history and list of synonyms, a top toolbar with access to the app’s standard actions, the word diagram area and a right pane that provides all the meanings of the searched word.

A hypernym, such as “word” includes numerous meanings, thus multiple branches. Each major meaning is divided into several other secondary meanings, and so on. In addition to this, you can filter the map view based on relations and / or parts of speech.

Thus, you can choose to show or hide the nouns, verbs, adverbs or adjectives in the diagram. Each part of speech has a different color: nouns are red, verbs are green and adjectives are yellow. Moreover, clicking on each connected dot will open a popup with dictionary explanations.

SynMap is powered by WordNet 3.0, a comprehensive online dictionary created at Princeton University. The app also fetches audio pronunciations from this popular source, but an Internet connection is required.

As a bonus option, SynMap enables you to add the currently viewed word to a list of bookmarks and to share the word diagram on Twitter, Facebook or Flickr, to email it via your default mail client or to share it on AirDrop.

To sum up, SynMap is an unconventional application that offers an interesting solution to discovering new words and their meanings. On top of that, the main window is simple to operate. In conclusion, if you like words and would like to create maps of semantic relations, this should be your go-to app.