Find words by meaning

Find words by what they mean

findByMeaning finds the commonest words whose English meaning holds the whole word or phrase you give it. A gloss that holds water matches; watermelon does not. Words that every gloss has (to, the, a, of) are left out of the text, so walk finds "to walk".

import {findByMeaning} from "@johnmorrisdotca/jisho/words";
const found=await findByMeaning("water",{limit:5});
console.log(found.map((one)=>`${one.written} ${one.meaning}`));
console.log((await findByMeaning("go out",{limit:3})).map((one)=>one.written));

[
  '水 water (esp. cool or cold); fluid (esp. in an animal tissue)',
  '水分 water, liquid, fluid',
  "水上 on the water, aquatic; waterside, water's edge",
  '注ぐ to pour (into); to sprinkle on (from above)',
  'お水 water, (drinking) water, (glass of) water'
]
[ '出かける', '出歩く', '出る' ]

The words whose gloss is exactly the text come first (a word whose first gloss it is, such as 飲む for drink, before one that has it later), then the commonest. It takes the mode, block and allow that loadWords takes. The index holds, for each English term, the readings of twenty words that have it: up to ten whose gloss is exactly the term, then the commonest that merely hold it; every word JMdict ranks has all of its terms and every pair of terms that follow each other in a gloss (so a phrase finds its words), and a word it does not rank, which is most of the dictionary, only the terms of its first gloss. So a very common term reaches only the commonest words, there is no stemming (walking does not find "walk"), and limit (10 unless you say, and never more than 20) is also the most pieces of the dictionary it fetches, one for each word.

searchMeanings(words, text) is the same search over words you already have, with nothing fetched. It is the way to search the common table:

import {loadCommonWords,searchMeanings} from "@johnmorrisdotca/jisho/words";
const common=await loadCommonWords();
console.log(searchMeanings(common,"paper").slice(0,3).map((one)=>one.written));

[ '紙', '紙上', 'パー' ]

See also

• Look words up: the lookup these build on, safe and unfiltered modes, and your own lists.
• Troubleshooting and questions