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Never use a long word where a short one will do — George Orwell, pre-Twitter


Thsrs calls itself “The Shorter Thesaurus.” Enter a word and it provides one or more synonyms that contain fewer letters than the original word.


Heaven = Eden

Filthy = foul, nasty, dirty, lousy, awful

Obstreperous = aggressive, defiant, stubborn

Why would anyone want such a capability? Click below to find out:

Because of the growing popularity of social networking services such as Twitter, where users write extremely short messages about whatever’s on their minds

Here’s how the developer of the app, Ironic Sans describes the challenge:

How can you intelligently get across a complex thought in just 140 characters w/o needing 2 use ugly abbrev’s? If only there were a service that helps with the struggle of rewriting a 146-letter message to fit in a 140 character limit. Well now there is: Thsrs, the thesaurus that only gives you synonyms shorter than the word you’re looking up. Just enter one of the longer words in your message, and Thsrs will suggest shorter words to use instead.

Here’s what the simple app looks like. Click it to be taken to the page:


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Richard Marini

Richard Marini