General question first. Is there any thesaurus (and I doubt there is) where you can look up words that don’t exist?
Specific question:
I need to do a presentation for work and I need a word that means the same thing as ‘learnings.’ I know, learnings is not a word, but I think most of you can see what i am trying to express.
I mean ‘knowledge acquisitions’ just doesn’t sound right. I need a one or two word way to say ‘here is what I learned’ in a noun form. ‘Findings’ isn’t quite right either. This is like “I went to training, and here are my key learnings.” See how findings wouldn’t work?
Here is what the thesaurus gives for findings, and nothing is quite right, but poop sheet is nice:
I doubt anyone would ever be able to come up with such a reference list, simply because there are too many possible words that don’t exist.
One thing that might be of interest is plugging in the largest root word into the thesaurus and seeing if you can get anything that can be easily converted into the type of term you mean. For instance, instead of using findings, try punching in ‘learn’ and see what you get.
Well, lessons learned might work. I am doing a powerpoint on my internship, and for years the format and section headings for each project have been ‘goals, action steps, results, key learnings’ and it has always bothered me that key learnings isn’t an actual word. It works well though, because you can put factual infromation in there as well as personal development. For example you could say ‘key learnings - operation of the press, OSHA requirements, and leadership skills’ where as lessons learned seems to me more like ‘don’t start the hopper before you check for loose bolts.’ Maybe I am just too worried about minor differences in word meaning, but it bothers me that I just can’t think of a word that works as well as this faux-mot. Maybe that’s one of the reasons ‘key learnings’ works so well… since no one has every really used it before, it derives it’s meaning from the context we use it in, so of course it works perfectly.
I think I am going to go with ‘exposures and experiences.’ Exposures would be things like ‘OSHA requirements’ and experiences would be things like ‘leadership.’ I’m still not satisfied though.
