…she stumbled and he caught her as she fell, sweeping her up in his – in his – what is that word? Darn it. You know the word. It means big, tough guy arms but not strong arms. Stereotype alert. What is that word? I had it a minute ago.

Happen to you?

It happens to everyone, especially writers. Sometimes I think our heads are so filled up with words, it’s like plunging your hand into an aquarium of tetras and hoping to catch just that one, you know, that one! The words slip right out of your brain.

The OneLook Reverse Dictionary and Thesaurus is here to help. It provides a free thesaurus and reverse dictionary look-up feature to help you overcome your brain farts, as we tend to call them.

I typed in the words “strong arms” and hit enter.

My choices were divided into All, Verbs, Adverbs, Nouns, and Adjectives, each with multiple pages of suggestions. “Strong arms” matched with the definition of “enforce,” which made me realize that the web page service concluded I meant “strong-armed” rather than the description of a pair of strong arms. Still, there were words I could use. In Adjectives I found muscular, heavy-armed, solid, colossal, substantial, gigantic, healthy, great, heavy, heft, savage, and smothered. My favorite was bionic but it didn’t work in this instance. There were many other words that weren’t appropriate, but they did trigger more descriptive ideas such as blockading, huddled, swarming, and pressed.

Clicking the “More Definitions” button opened a new web page with variations on the word “enforce,” which wasn’t going in the right direction, but did show the capabilities of the service to help you track down the right word. It listed links to definitions on over 30 different alternative sources, giving me the opportunity to really dig into the meaning of a word.

OneLook isn’t the only reverse word lookup service on the web. Experiment with The Reverse Dictionary and Reverse Word Search-Lookup by Wordsmyth.

And good luck with those word slippages.