Writing well is laborsome. A good dictionary helps but it's only usable in one direction. You have to think of a word, look it up, chase references and so on. Even more work!
It may be helpful to look up words by meaning, by what we as writers want to express.
For example, if we had a function find_words("I'm lost for words")
and it would present us with a choice of words:
astoundment, bewildered, blank, confus, distraught, perplexly, stagger, stound, unyielded
then we may find the right word we want, without all the gyrations of traditional dictionary use.
Can we implement this function? The answer is yes and it's not hard (if you know your way around python)!
see reverse_dictionary.ipynb