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Show HN: EtymologyExplorer – visual navigation of word family trees

4 pointsby decuranover 4 years ago

1 comment

decuranover 4 years ago
Hello! Creator here. This app shows word evolutions in a visual format similar to a family tree. I made this because I&#x27;m really interested in how words relate to one another. For example &quot;magnanimous&quot; can be understood through its relatives &quot;magnificent&quot; and &quot;unanimous&quot;<p>Working on it has been both a blast and a slog (~6 years on &amp; off). I used DL NLP (thanks fast.ai!) to convert written etymology paragraphs into a database of words and connections. The accuracy is roughly 99%. There are about 1.4M words and 1.3M word-pair-connections across 13k languages. The most interesting thing has been finding Proto-Indo-European roots, like &quot;h₂enh₁&quot;, which is a 10k-year-old reconstructed word meaning &quot;breath&quot;, that has about 1k modern day descendants ranging from &quot;nose&quot; to &quot;anemone&quot;.<p>I&#x27;ve had about 30k downloads since 2017 and I&#x27;m making a modest amount from sales of premium (to removes ads), which I&#x27;d like to grow. I&#x27;m thinking maybe another visualization style that&#x27;s only available in premium? So I&#x27;d be very appreciative of any feedback at all!