Searching in the Thesaurus

The online thesaurus in Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts contains the controlled terms (descriptors) from the Thesaurus of Linguistic Indexing Terms. Use the online thesaurus to select the preferred indexing terms for your search.

To use the thesaurus, type a term to look up at the thesaurus prompt; the List of Permuted Terms is displayed (an alphabetical list of all terms in the thesaurus). You can select one or more terms from the Permuted List, or you can choose to see Term Details for a particular term. The Term Details defines a term and lists all its Broader (less specific), Narrower (more specific), and Related terms. You can also select search terms from the Term Details. You can select as many thesaurus terms for searching as you wish; SPIRS combines the terms with the or operator.

Refer to the SPIRS Help for more information on using the Thesaurus.