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Keyword from Swift Software is a disc-based utility that provides interactive help for word processing, crossword solving, Scrabble and so on - in fact, anything involving words. You could, of course, use a thesaurus - a book of words rather like a dictionary.

But whereas a dictionary is arranged alphabetically, a thesaurus is organised by ideas or topics and it can take a long time to find the exact nuance you want. A computerised version however, would be much faster and that's where Keyword comes in. It offers more than 10,000 words and nearly 1,000 subject headings.

The dictionary is held on disc and is run by booting with SHIFT-BREAK. Using it is easy: I entered the word speech and after a brief disc whirr two words were shown - speech and speechless.

Selecting speechless with the cursor keys yielded the two categories muteness and wonder. I chose the former and was rewarded with 16 possibilities, of which dumbfound was close to the word I wanted - dumbfounded. Had I not been satisfied with anything in the list I could have selected one of the words and found further categories from which to choose.

There is no doubt that this is a useful and powerful piece of software, but it has its drawbacks. It is more expensive that even the largest printed thesaurus and, unlike book editions, it fails to separate entries by parts of speech - successive entries under muteness were the noun silence and the verb soften.

There are a few spelling errors - for instance indefinate, defense, intelligability. Although 10,000 words represents many times the average person's vocabulary, it is not enough for professional writers.

One major fault is that you can't call on it from within a word processor like View. You must save your work, boot up Keyword, find the word, enter View and finally reload your text.

As a true thesaurus, Keyword is limited by its size. However, as a word finder for everyday use it is excellent. Next time I am stuck for a word I shall be using Keyword rather than reaching for the thesaurus on the bookshelf. Give me convenience every time.

Bruce Goatly