Graphing how the 10k* most common English words define each other • Hacker News Board

Re: Graphing how the 10k* most common English words define each other

#21

Post by WillAdams » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 11:04 AM UTC

Nice! Reminds me a bit of "WordWeb" which is still around:

https://wordweb.info/free/

which also uses WordNet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordNet

(which this is also using)

which was developed by Princeton w/ DARPA money as an early investigation into AI and so forth.

Re: Graphing how the 10k* most common English words define each other

#22

Post by MrDrDr » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 11:08 AM UTC

I remember thinking about this when the semantic web was first being discussed. If you think of it from the perceptive of a child, your first 'foundational' words are learned though direct experience. Then while you continue to learn words this way, we can also use those words we 'know' to define secondary or tertiary terms that we have no direct experience of. I'd like to see a graph like this with someones take on the minimum number of necessary foundational words and how that graph would look.

Re: Graphing how the 10k* most common English words define each other

#23

Post by euroderf » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 12:45 PM UTC

MrDrDr wrote: post #22

I remember thinking about this when the semantic web was first being discussed. If you think of it from the perceptive of a child, your first 'foundational' words are learned though direct experience. Then while you continue to learn words this way, we can also use those words we 'know' to define secondary or tertiary terms that we have no direct experience of. I'd like to see a graph like this with someones take on…

> If you think of it from the perceptive of a child, your first 'foundational' words are learned through direct experience.

And lest we (or AGI) forget, there's qualia in the foundations.

Re: Graphing how the 10k* most common English words define each other

#24

Post by yubainu » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 3:35 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Graphing how the 10k* most common English words define each other

#25

Post by will_critchlow » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 5:56 PM UTC

It seems like this is a common thing to go down the rabbit hole of. My version was trying to run pagerank on the directed graph: https://x.com/willcritchlow/status/2013598472562168056

Re: Graphing how the 10k* most common English words define each other

#26

Post by xtiansimon » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 6:39 PM UTC

Careful. This is starting to sound like Saussurean semiotics.

Re: Graphing how the 10k* most common English words define each other

#27

Post by wyattsell » Wed, Mar 11, 2026, 2:27 AM UTC

jaen wrote: post #20

avidiax wrote: post #9

If you like this, you would probably enjoy Princeton Wordnet. They have unfortunately stopped developing it. You can still browse it a bit online with some 3rd party sites: https://en-word.net/

The page literally credits "Open English Wordnet" (based on it) in the sidebar :) (the link is broken though, it should be https://github.com/globalwordnet/english-wordnet )

fixed, thanks for pointing that out.