The above-mentioned Oxford Thesaurus is very decent. But for the most part academese is acquired through reading, reading, and more reading. Sometimes it helps to pick up glossaries of terms, intro books to the subject matter, etc. Along the way you simply acquire the specialized vocab of your field and before you know it you too can spout off about the subliminal sublime in Latour's dialectical hermeneutics of the postcolonial diaspora! More on reddit.com

I haven't used this particular site before, but let me give another shout out to the University of Glasgow's Historic Thesaurus: https://ht.ac.uk/ It's a "fork" of the OED's excellent etymology research, but actually FREE to the public (unlike those money grubbing bastards). I use it for Early Modern period pieces, but it's a great resource for obscure clerical terms in your magic system, or general oddities and linguistic dead ends. More on reddit.com

I agree with everything you have written, but I must defend the thesaurus! I agree that it's a mistake to use the thesaurus just to find a "fancier" version of the word you're thinking of. But the thesaurus is great when you've thought of a word, but it's not quite right. It's also useful when you've used a word recently and you need to reference something similar, but you don't want to repeat the word and your stupid brain just isn't pulling up a synonym for you. I typically use the thesaurus when I have a word in mind, but the connotation is slightly off. Let's play with this line: Maybe it had been an old family name, burnished by generations of use. But what if I don't want to evoke the imagery of a family heirloom that is carefully kept and polished? Let's say I want to evoke one of those family names that gets used over and over again and it feels stodgy and rigid and kind of stuck up. I want to say it's been stiffened with use. But that's not a great word. I'm going to the thesaurus right now. I don't really like any of the offerings under "stiffen." I'm going to check "harden." And there's fossilize! That's perfect! It's not a fancy word, but I wouldn't have gotten there on my own because I can't always remember every word I know. Part of what makes prose beautiful is when you encounter an unexpected word that evokes a very specific and unique idea. I love how "burnished" was used to describe a family name and it creates a lovely metaphor, but my tired brain can't always get there on it's own and often goes for the most basic word first. And then I have to pull out the thesaurus to help my brain dig a little deeper and find something that is more specific and unexpected (but not necessarily unusual). Edit: I do want to thank you for starting a discussion on prose. I think this sub has too much focus on story ideas and not enough consideration is given to the importance of prose. More on reddit.com

I was really hoping to get some real answers. More on reddit.com