Use “Just The Word” to find phrases that sound great

Just The Word is a powerful tool for figuring out how a word patterns with other words: what are possible grammatical phrase structures for a word, and what words go with your search term? Just The Word uses a subset of 80 million words of the British National Corpus, a database of published written language and transcribed spoken language, to identify these patterns.

Let’s look, for example, at what Just The Word can tell us about ways to use the word “eventual,” because we’re writing a paper with the sentence, “This process will eventual produce a purified substance,” and we want to check our grammar and word choices. We can see that the only common phrase structure is [eventual + noun]. We see two meaning clusters, one about winning and one about results. We see

First, we can see that the only common phrase structure is [eventual + noun]. Whoops, we have [eventual + verb]. We see two meaning clusters, one about winning and one about results. We see a third collection of common phrases with different meanings.

Just The Word

So, let’s look up “eventually,” the form that we maybe need with verbs.

just the word

Aha! We can confirm that this is a solid usage pattern for “eventually,” and that “eventually produce” turns up 29 times. We can double check that these 29 examples represent the kind of meaning that we want by clicking on the phrase. Scanning through these examples, we can see that a few of them do indeed talk about a natural or experimental process, which is what we’re looking for.

We might also take note of the multiple examples that refer to producing films or to social conditions that produce people with certain behaviors.

Just The Word

Post a comment with what patterns your search reveals at Just The Word.

4 thoughts on “Use “Just The Word” to find phrases that sound great

    1. Occasionally I find that “Just the Word” goes down, but it’s usually back up again within a few hours.

    1. This site is useful for finding common combinations of words, and might be especially helpful for choosing prepositions in predictable ways for readers.

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