Online Thesaurus Fail

I wrote an album review for the local magazine that I freelance for, Performer Magazine, and was trying to find a different word for “showcase.” I asked a few other editors if they had any ideas, but nothing captured exactly what I was trying to express.

That’s OK, I thought, there’s still the world of online thesauri. First I tried the old standby, Thesaurus.com. I typed in ‘showcase’ then ‘show case’ and didn’t get a single result for either version. Well, actually, Thesaurus.com asked if I meant ‘show case’ instead of ‘showcase.’ Looks promising. Sure, I clicked, why not? No results came up.

After a couple of minutes of questioning Thesaurus.com’s ability to function as an actual thesaurus, I moved on to Merriam-Webster – that paragon of Word of the Day. Again I tried both ‘showcase’ and ‘show case.’ Again, I got no results. Well, almost no results. Merriam-Webster didn’t exactly say: ‘We ain’t found shit!’ But it was close.

Instead, it asked if I could’ve been searching for either of these two words:

Jocose
Sausage

Really. Sausage. Showcase. Jocose. Showcase. Sausage. Oh yeah, I can see how those might be related.

Fail.