If you’re a writer, you probably use the Internet for research and fact checking. But apart from some good online dictionaries and thesauri (such as yourDictionary.com) there’s little to provide genuine inspiration at blank-page time.

Until now. If you’re stuck for a word, or a direction to take a plot, check out the Visual Thesaurus. It displays the relationships between words, revealing clusters of meanings tied together by lexical concepts. Using a beautiful, 3-D interface, it translates language into a visible architecture – a bit like a mind-map.

This extraordinarily useful tool accesses data from WordNet, a lexical reference system developed by the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton University. WordNet is inspired by psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory and contains over 50,000 words and 40,000 phrases.

The Visual Thesaurus is easy to use, even for those with dial-up modems, and strangely addictive. There’s a ‘Desktop Edition’ that you can buy, but give the online version a try: just enter a word in the search box at the top left of the screen.