How to read the charts

The word fingerprint — every word gets one

Five fixed wedges, always in the same order and the same colour, so any two charts are directly comparable at a glance:

• Register — how formal or informal the word is, from slang up through neutral to literary.
• Era — whether it reads as archaic, dated, perfectly current, or a very new coinage.
• Frequency — how often you'll actually run into it: rare, academic, common, or a core everyday word.
• Domain — whether it belongs to a specific field (medical, legal, technology…). General-purpose words keep this wedge short; a specialised word pushes it out.
• Tone — its connotation: green and reaching further out for positive, red for negative, grey and short for neutral.

For every wedge, how far the colour reaches out from the centre is the word's position on that scale — never "good" or "bad," just where it sits. The letter in the middle is the part of speech (N for noun, V for verb, and so on).

Anwalt (lawyer) is a legal-domain word, so its Domain wedge pushes out much further than Freiheit's (freedom is a general-purpose, everyday abstraction) — that's the one wedge where these two visibly differ. Everything else about them reads as ordinary, neutral, current vocabulary.

The meaning fingerprint — nouns and verbs only

This second chart only appears on nouns and verbs. Its categories come straight from the grade-school definitions of those two word classes — "a noun names a person, place, thing or idea," "a verb shows an action, occurrence or state of being" — and there's no equivalent split for adjectives, adverbs or anything else, so they simply don't get one.

A noun's five wedges are Category (person / place / thing / idea), Concreteness, Animacy, Countability and Scope. A verb keeps the same five coloured slots but relabelled for what matters to a verb instead: Category (action / occurrence / state), Concreteness, Agency, Duration and Transitivity.

Two verbs, five wedges apart

sterben (to die) and kaufen (to buy) are both everyday, concrete verbs — look back at the word fingerprint above and you'll find they'd look almost identical there. On the meaning fingerprint they could hardly be more different: dying is something that happens to you (an occurrence, not an action), involuntary, over in a single punctual instant, with no object (intransitive — you just die). Buying is something you choose to do (an action), voluntary, a durative process you can take your time over, and it always takes an object (transitive — you buy something). The two charts prove the point: near-identical word fingerprints, completely different meaning fingerprints — the two charts measure genuinely different things.

Two nouns, five wedges apart

Anwalt (lawyer) is about as concrete a noun as they come: a person, concrete, animate. Freiheit (freedom) sits at the opposite end: an idea, abstract, inanimate — you can't point at freedom the way you can point at a lawyer. Both happen to be countable single concepts (you can say "zwei Anwälte" or "verschiedene Freiheiten"), which is why those two wedges match while the first three don't.