Membean Synonym Finder

A simple tool to help with adding membean words to essays. It's capable of identifying membean words already in your essay, as well as of finding other words that could be replaced with membean words.

It scans each word in the essay, and provides a list of possible membean word synonyms for each one. Keep in mind that there are many false positives; many words have multiple meanings. If you blindly follow all the suggestions of this tool without actually knowing what the words mean, you will lose points. And you will probably deserve it.

Dependencies

You must have python installed in order to run this project. See https://www.python.org/downloads/ for more information.

Beyond that, this project uses two dependencies:

• termcolor (and colorama on Windows), to print out nice looking outputs, and
• pyperclip, to allow easy input from the clipboard (without this, it's sometimes difficult to paste in a large essay).

However, neither of these dependencies are strictly required, so the following steps may be skipped (albeit with reduced functionality).

Windows

Replace path/to/project with whatever the file path of the MembeanSynonym directory is on your device.

cd path/to/project
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

macOS

Replace path/to/project with whatever the file path of the MembeanSynonym directory is on your device.

cd path/to/project
python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Linux/Whatever else

You know how to install a requirements.txt.

Usage

Running from GitHub Release (recommended)

Navigate to the latest release in the GitHub sidebar. It should look like this:

From here, download MembeanSynonym if you are running macOS or Linux, and MembeanSynonym.exe if you are on Windows.

See https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/releasing-projects-on-github/about-releases for more information about releases.

Running from Source

After downloading the repository, run the following:

Note: Replace path/to/project with whatever the file path of the MembeanSynonym directory is on your device. On macOS, replace all usages of python with python3.

cd path/to/project
python main.py

Input

If pyperclip is installed, you'll be first prompted for an input mode:

How do you want to input your essay (type 'c' to get it from your clipboard; type 'm' to type/paste it in manually)

Selecting m will allow you to manually input the text to be analyzed. Selecting c will automatically input whatever has been copied to the clipboard using Ctrl+C (Cmd+C on macOS).

If pyperclip is not installed, you'll have to input the text manually. Note that your shell may have issues pasting in large amounts of text: for this reason, using the c mode with pyperclip is strongly recommended.

Membean Level Selection

This tool can be configured to only use membean words of a specific level or levels. To do so, respond with a comma separated list (ex. 3, 4, 5) when prompted:

Which membean levels would you like to include? Enter a comma separated list, or press enter to include words from all levels.

Data Sources

The full membean word list can be found at https://membean.com/products/educator/wordlist.

Synonyms are pulled from the Moby Thesaurus II, which can be found at https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=3202.