Vocabulary Tool: Lexipedia

    Lexipedia (https://www.lexipedia.com/) is an online visual semantic network with a dictionary including the searched words' thesaurus (synonym), antonym, and fuzzynym (connotation) reference functionality. The website presents words' with their semantic relationships displayed in an animated visual word web. Other than English, it supports 5 languages; Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

    The noun, verb, adverb, and adjective forms of the searched word are also represented with different colors, so the students can see the definition of the word they searched in different forms when they click on those colored dots in the semantic diagram. Besides, every word comes with an example sentence which enables students to see the words in different contexts. As former English language learners and future teachers, the presence of fuzzynyms is a feature that we usually do not encounter in basic hard-copy dictionaries, so Lexipedia gives the students the opportunity to learn about the connotations of words with the visual word web. 

    For instance, when they search the verb "swim", the fuzzynyms that will pop up along the verb would be the ones below that we can see in purple, several of which are sail, drown, go down, etc. 

    When used by language teachers for vocabulary building, the visual aid of Lexipedia allows students to unintentionally see and learn many different words and contexts related to the word they are searching for.