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What's the best way to find every word commonly physically contiguous in real life to another word? By that, I mean every parts typically found on a ship or an ancient ship such as sail, mast, aft, rudder, etc? I can't find any good thesaurus that does this and I am surprised considering we have so many applications using machine learning.

Sayaman
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    I’m voting to close this question because it is asking questions about taxonomy and nomenclature sets in hierarchical classifications. These are subjects for a research library and have nothing to do with writing. – EDL Mar 01 '21 at 03:28
  • Similar closure reasons for me as well, except I made my vote as "too opinion-based" as there is no one word for this scenario. – user11111111111 Mar 01 '21 at 05:06
  • I'm not entirely following what precisely you are asking, so not voting to close yet in case you can better define the question. I think you're looking for specialty illustrated books with diagrams showing the breakdown of things into their components, but that also doesn't seem quite to get the flavor of what you're asking, since these are often children's books. – DWKraus Mar 01 '21 at 06:06
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    My understanding is that they are asking for a resource similar to a thesaurus, but instead of looking up a word and finding a list of synonyms, you look up a word and find a list of things which are commonly found near it in real life. So if you look up sail, you find mast, aft, rudder, as in the given example, and if you look up kettle, you find toaster, sink, oven etc. I think the answer will be that no such resource exists, though. – DM_with_secrets Mar 01 '21 at 11:41
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    That said, a crossword solver's dictionary might be closest - similar to a thesaurus but includes related words as well as synonyms. – DM_with_secrets Mar 01 '21 at 11:42
  • @DM_with_secrets That's a good idea. For nautical, the best I could come up with was a visual dictionary like this https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/ships-and-sailing-dk-visual-dictionaries_roger-tritton/268270/item/3817329/?mkwid=%7cdc&pcrid=494412958018&pkw=&pmt=&slid=&plc=&pgrid=119960546627&ptaid=pla-1151316948670&gclid=Cj0KCQiAvvKBBhCXARIsACTePW8GwmD0mrNkssnvQfHeKJIuLjkpbqtj88zyjAHeuRzKEcI7tf-G8YoaAroTEALw_wcB#idiq=3817329&edition=1930703 – DWKraus Mar 01 '21 at 14:01

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This is where research comes in. (And Google, Duckduckgo, etc are your best friends!)

For example, the ship terms I'd say would be best defined by a dictionary of ships terms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_nautical_terms

Or even ask the question directly: "list of ships parts", and the first hit is https://shipfever.com/ship-parts-function/

Or how about "taxonomy search words related to ship" https://relatedwords.org/relatedto/ship

As you can see the relationship between words can be many different things, so your best bet is to ask the question you have directly in a search engine.

Erk
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