Do you seek a precise term, only to find that it stays on the tip of your tongue but can’t be remembered? Now there is a discovery that helps anyone wishing to use English correctly, and especially for the following occupations:
Authors. Journalists. Advertising copywriters. Technical writers. Editors. Lawyers. Product namers. Patent attorneys. Word gamesters. Natural scientists. Social scientists. Linguists. Multi-national corporation personnel. English-learning foreigners. Translators. Engineering specification writers. Public relaters (PR). Librarians. Artificial intelligists. Teachers & students.

  All these wordsmiths require verbal precision to execute their plans. For example, suppose you’re trying to remember the word that means delaying a vote by debating endlessly. Up to now, there has been no systematic way to answer questions like these. Yet such knowledge is absolutely needed by many occupations.

  Even the very useful alphabetical dictionary requires you to know the word before you can look it up! And Roget’s Thesaurus is wonderful. However, it tells you only synonyms – things that mean the same as what you already know, rather than what happened just before it or just after an action.

  But Burger’s Wordtree ® assumes that you do not know the word, and so it leads you there. That’s why it’s a reverse ("onomantic") dictionary.

  Most reverse dictionaries tell you only the obvious: Heart doctor =Cardiologist. The alphabetic arrangement is merely conventional, not based on any science. And so there’s no systematic reasoning, only the accident of discovering phrases like Heart Doctor. But our reverse dictionary is arranged in micro-processes from simple to complex. And it seems to be by far the world’s largest reverser. That is because it’s the world’s only full-language reverse dictionary, covering all (over 20,000) procedural words of the English language. Including all kinds of cross-reference, it lists a quarter-million entries! So if you want same-meaning words, use Roget’s Thesaurus. But if you want to differentiate ideas, use Burger’s Wordtree. It’s the add-on dictionary that branches back toward causes, and forward toward effects.

  MENTION A SNIPPET, AND WE’LL SUPPLY THE BEST WORD! With The Wordtree, you simply look up any part, any fragment of the term you are looking for. It will offer you many leads in different directions. Follow the direction that sounds closest to your idea, and, depending on how precisely you want the expression, you’ll run into it. For example, on that term for delaying a vote by debating endlessly, you could look up in the "D" pages under Delay, and it would lead you to: Delay by debating = To filibuster. Or you could look it up by the other fragment, Debate, and you’d find that: To debate & [thereby] to delay = to filibuster. "Someone hunting for a particular idea can enter the stream anywhere and be guided hierarchically … forward to its … effects, backward to its precedents and causes, " reported the International Journal of Lexicography, volume 2, pages 147-151 (Oxford University Press).

  You simply pinpoint how "deep" you want a process word. And right at that place is the exactly best word in English for your idea.

The Wordtree covers both physical and cultural procedures. Physical, for instance, To pulley and to raise = to hoist. To winch and to hoist = to windlass.

  What about words with multiple meanings? - Our rich language has a precise term for each meaning! And The Wordtree refers you to the correct level. To CHECK <something>, for example, leads graphically to CHECK-MARK – administratively to BACK-CHECK – financially to CHEQUE, and over 40 others!

Don’t you resent people whose comments are limited to "y’know," "okay," "whatever," and "well,…"? Then, EXPRESS YOURSELF!

  The language is filled with colorful, precise terms. But the regular (alphabetic-only) dictionary has to keep repeating all simpler ideas in each definition of a complex idea. And so it can’t afford space to show the richness of our language.

  And so two simple words can locate and differentiate any verb in the entire language! Each two words are constantly summed up in one new word. Such an add-on system somewhat abbreviates the old idea at each branch. Saving tremendous space, it allows us to include more of these impact verbs than any other dictionary in the world of which we know. Now, you’ll still need those other types, such as Roget’s wonderful Thesaurus. But The Wordtree reverse dictionary gives you the advantage of instant precision from within a gigantic storehouse. And any fragment, such as to nourish, leads you backward to simpler words, and forward to more complicated words.

  And many dozens of other precise terms! The Wordtree directs you, then, from your goal to all possible mechanisms for attaining it.

  The Wordtree can be used to play many types of game. But we’ve designed it primarily for serious business – helping you pinpoint the right one word of the hundreds of thousands in the English language. And for that, you do need help, whether you are a native English speaker, or a recent immigrant.

  The oddities of spelling, etc., cause the language to be a jumble when arranged by mere alphabetization. But we arrange twice: An alphabetic Index. -- AND a Hierarchy of processes. -- Suppose, then, that an invention is proposed which involves a PIVOT. Our "P" pages show 13 pivot-based techniques: To PIVOT and BOB = to SEESAW. To PIVOT and PUNT = to QUANT, etc. Thereby an engineer or an attorney can produce a claim enlarged as much as 13 times!

  Because Burger’s Wordtree is arranged by add-on, it shows the before and the after of each process. But they are the cultural possibilities, not certainties. It lists, for example, to beau <someone> - to steady-date - to single-friend - to pairbond - to espouse - to marry, etc. However, branches carry the user to other possibilities (such as to divorce or even to Giacobazzi someone)!

  By listing all the terms, The Wordrtree is really listing all the culturally recognized possibilities. By showing the newest important term, The Wordtree gives insight into the way a society works. For example, you’ve heard it said that there is a mammoth change occurring as we move from products into services. But The Wordtree reveals that the brainier types of engineer have quietly created a verb, to productize. It means to standardize the elements of a service into a kit. In other words, many of the recently created service industries are working toward materializing a service into a product. But many of the services are too recent to have had enough time to complete the process. Meanwhile, whenever your word searches lead you to that general area, the suggestion to productize shows up.

  And what about all those acronyms – words made of initials, like the International Monetary Fund (IMF)? Instead of condemning them as bad English, we see them as an increasing part of the modern world, and we gladly list them: The Wordtree shows that entire nations are now being "IMF’’ed" by international consultants!

  This hard-covered book lists a quarter-million (250,000) completely systematized entries. Most reverse dictionaries, being simple lists collected over the years without connecting theory, have under 10,000 entries.

  Furthermore, The Wordtree precisely differentiates each of the language’s 20,000 known processes. No wonder, then, that one book critic burbled that "The Wordtree [has become] the biggest, punchiest dictionary of them all"! And that was said by the book reviewer of The (London) Times Higher Education Supplement, located at the very "headquarters" of the English language.

  But don’t throw away your alphabetical dictionaries. After you have found the desired term in The Wordtree, if you want more explanation, look it up in a well-balanced work like the American Heritage dictionary. Or, if it’s a new word, in the copious Barnhart Dictionary of New English. Or in a phrase dictionary, etc.

  EVEN NOVEL MEDIA ARE SOURCED. Our information was gathered from many scores of dictionaries, especially occupational skills. We have all the traditional verbs from the traditional media. Beyond that, however, a thousand professional and technical people contributed words from their own specialties. Traditional wordbooks scan only certain media, such as newspapers and books. But the editor, as an anthropologist, had the staff also monitor entire new sites of real language:  billboards, truck-chassis posters, cable television, direct-mail messages, product labels, even voice-mail instructions used by large organizations, match-book covers, – some two dozen types of media apparently never reported before!

Our criteria remain, however, that they must have appeared in a responsible technical, professional, or mass medium (not just play-words, for instance).

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  The quantity of our impact verbs is about 30% greater than listed in the world’s most unabridged dictionary (the supreme Oxford English Dictionary. Since the Wordtree system is a continuous web of procedures-verbs-we show only hundreds of adjectives, etc.). But it is a disciplined, Ivy-Leaguer-edited, reference book, not a careless potpourri. Unlike almost every other dictionary, for instance, we specify the exact source of each transitive – even the date and page number if from a print source. If from a broadcast, you are also told the station, day and minute. Thus you sense its level of usage, and can check on our accuracy. Here is truly 21st Century "informatics".

  The Wordtree is truly interdisciplinary. It has now been rated so important that at least eighty-five (85) publications have published full-length book reviews of The Wordtree. The Chronicle of the American Translators Association said that The Wordtree "deserves the highest praise…." And Cambridge University’s Encyclopedia of the English Language (edited by David Crystal) awards the system its own listing-category!