Word Family Trees – Exploring Words and Compounds

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Hello everyone,

And welcome to a new episode of My New Tool.
Horaay!
Also, this is probably more of a tool upgrade than a completely new tool, but anyway.

Folks, I’m proud to present to you the new and upgraded version of my

Word Family Explorer

Those of you who use my dictionary regularly might know what I’m talking about, and if you don’t, well, no problem. I’ll explain what and why and maybe you’ll use my dictionary more often because the tool is just so cool

So, are you ready to take a look?
Let’s go.

Understanding word relations and where words come from can be super helpful for learning and retaining vocabulary.

That’s why I have built out a family section in my dictionary.

There, you can see here a word comes from and also if it has any interesting child words that are derived from it.
And you can explore the root a word comes from and see if there are any related English words.

It’s not complete yet, and it probably never will be, because the dictionary constantly grows and I enter the family stuff by hand, because I want to make sure it’s accurate and doesn’t get filled up with Ai errors.

But yeah… a couple of months ago, I rolled out a new explorer tool that let you kind of “climb down” the family tree of a word and explore ALL its children.

That was only phase one of my grand plan though, muahahahaha.

Now, I have finished phase two and that brings two BIG improvements.

1)  Walking up the family tree

Before, you could only explore the family tree of a word in one direction – downward. Now, you can also climb up and trace all the ancestors up to the root, all without leaving the entry you’re on and tree you’re in.

2)  Compounds

In my original system a word could only have ONE parent and for compounds, I would basically choose which one to connect.

Now, a word can have multiple parents. Nachtisch for instance will have the parents nach and Tisch. And you can climb up the tree further and see where nach is from or where Tisch is from, and so on.

But hey, all this sounds fairly abstract, so instead of describing it, let me just show you how it looks.

Example for the Family Tree Tool

I’ll use the entry for vorher as  an example.
Here’s how the family tree section looks like by default.

A) These are the “parents” of B, the word you’re currently looking at in the dictionary

B) This is the entry you’ve opened in the dictionary.

C) These are the words that are derived from B. Sometimes it’s  just two, sometimes its over 20

D) The number tells you how many parents or kids the word has. Clicking it will unveil them.

To walk up and down the tree, just click on the words to unveil their parents or kids.
For us, it’ll could look like this:

I have followed the branch of vor upward and checked what kids there are of vorher. And I could drill down further because the two verbs at the bottom have children themselves.

And while it’s nice to see these relatives, of course you kind of need to have a translation. And as a member, you have it right there with what I marked with E.
Just click the language symbol and you’ll see an overlay that lists the meanings of the word AND it gives you a direct link to the entry.

Now, naturally, you can only go one branch at a time. If I were to open ALL of them at once, it would be super messy.
But if you want to go back and follow the path of her, instead of the path of vor as I did in the screenshot, you just click back in the word you want to see the direct parents or kids for and the tree will go back there and you can follow the other branch.

Man… I don’t know if this even makes sense :).

Honestly, it sounds kind of boring when I describe it like this here, but it’s actually quite fun and intuitive to use, so I’d say… just give it a go.
And a good word to explore both directions is einfuehren, so here’s the link:

“einführen” – Family Tree Tool
(and dictionary entry)

I think this is a really cool tool for learning and exploring vocabulary but ultimately, it’s a tool for YOU, so I’m curious what you think. Is this useful? Is this fun to use? And what could I improve?

What I do think I’ll do is add the option to save a word to your vocabulary stash right there from the translation box.

And I’m also thinking about making an “unbound” version of this where you can really “surf” through families, without being “chained” to one particularly entry as it is now.

So if you have any thoughts about this, do let me know please.

But yeah… I’m quite happy with this so far, I hope you are too, and I can’t wait to read your thoughts and feedback.

That’s it for today, have fun playing around, have a great week and I’ll see you next time :).