The word instrument · one word in, everything out
One word.
Seven drawers.
Put a word on the bench and the drawers fill: what it means, how it is said — with the dictionary’s own recording where one exists — what rhymes with it perfectly and what nearly does, what sounds like it, what means like it, which adjectives it keeps company with, and which words walk in front of it and behind it in real prose. Every answer is a chip, and every chip runs the bench again. The rabbit hole is the point.
No key, no account, no server in the middle. The word relations come off Datamuse’s open word-finding engine; the definitions and audio come off the free dictionary API’s Wiktionary-derived entries — both read directly by this page, at the moment you ask.
7 drawers · 2 open wires · Datamuse + the free dictionary · no key, no account · read at the moment you ask
The bench
Everything out, in labelled drawers.
Type a word — or deal one — and the bench asks both wires at once. The chips in each drawer keep Datamuse’s own ranking, strongest first, and a press on any chip puts that word on the bench in turn.
The bench
waiting for a word
Nothing asked yet.
The fills
Four across, second letter A.
Write the word the way the grid shows it: ? for one
missing letter, * for any run of them. The answers come
back ranked by how common they are, and any of them can go straight
onto the bench.
Pattern
waiting for a pattern
? is exactly one letter · * is any number of them · the length box, if set, trims the answers after the wire speaks
About
An instrument, not an oracle.
The drawers are Datamuse — a word-finding engine built on dictionaries, n-gram counts and word-embedding data, published as a free, keyless API. Each relation is one query: perfect rhymes, near rhymes, sound-alikes, means-alikes, the adjectives a noun actually takes, and the words that most often come just before or just after. Datamuse scores every answer, and the chips keep that order — the firm-edged chips at the head of a drawer are its highest scores, not this page’s opinion.
The definition, the phonetic and the recording come from the Free Dictionary API, whose entries derive from Wiktionary; the audio is theirs, played as shipped. Not every word has an entry — a word the dictionary does not know says so, plainly, while the drawers answer anyway — and not every entry has a recording, so the speaker button only appears when there is one to press. When that API will not answer at all — its cache misses sometimes do — the bench asks Wiktionary’s own REST API for the senses instead, says so on the card, and goes without the phonetic and the recording.
What the wires do not say, the bench does not invent. A drawer with nothing in it reports empty; a wire that will not answer is reported as exactly that, drawer by drawer. Both requests leave this page for the two APIs directly — no key, no account, no server of ours in the middle — and the last word on the bench is remembered in this browser and nowhere else. A link to the bench carries the word with it.