Vizit

According to their website, Visuwords™ is an "online graphical dictionary — Look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate. Enter words into the search box to look them up or double-click a node to expand the tree. Click and drag the background to pan around and use the mouse wheel to zoom. Hover over nodes to see the definition and click and drag individual nodes to move them around to help clarify connections."

I gave it a whirl by entering the word blue, and it immediately built a nice big web of associations:



The service is also free for use by anyone with an internet connection; no membership or other access fee involved. I also noted this on the website -- "Visuwords™ uses Princeton University’s WordNet, an opensource database built by University students and language researchers" -- so that's a fairly respectable source.

TMT

Tip of My Tongue is one of those little online tools that is insanely helpful when you need a word but you can't remember exactly what it is. You feed it what you can remember: letters, partial fragments of the word, the meaning, what it sounds like etc., and it searches for word matches and produces a list of possibilities.

My guy and I were on a walk the other night and we passed a palm tree I thought was lovely -- but neither of us could remember the proper name of it. All we had was "sa-something." When we got home I fed the letters and meaning (palm tree) to TMT, and got this:



It was a sabal palm, as the TMT correctly guessed on the first run. When you're writing there is nothing more annoying than being unable to remember a word exactly, so this online tool can serve as a very helpful search and rescue for your brain.