What do you call someone who listens to you all the time?

About Reverse Dictionary

The way Reverse Dictionary works is pretty simple. It simply looks through tonnes of dictionary definitions and grabs the ones that most closely match your search query. For example, if you type something like "longing for a time in the past", then the engine will return "nostalgia". The engine has indexed several million definitions so far, and at this stage it's starting to give consistently good results (though it may return weird results sometimes). It acts a lot like a thesaurus except that it allows you to search with a definition, rather than a single word. So in a sense, this tool is a "search engine for words", or a sentence to word converter.

Table of Contents Show

About Reverse Dictionary
What does it feel like when someone really listens to you?
Good listeners are hard to find
What feeling heard feels like
Learning about listening from parents
Body language

I made this tool after working on Related Words which is a very similar tool, except it uses a bunch of algorithms and multiple databases to find similar words to a search query. That project is closer to a thesaurus in the sense that it returns synonyms for a word (or short phrase) query, but it also returns many broadly related words that aren't included in thesauri. So this project, Reverse Dictionary, is meant to go hand-in-hand with Related Words to act as a word-finding and brainstorming toolset. For those interested, I also developed Describing Words which helps you find adjectives and interesting descriptors for things (e.g. waves, sunsets, trees, etc.).

In case you didn't notice, you can click on words in the search results and you'll be presented with the definition of that word (if available). The definitions are sourced from the famous and open-source WordNet database, so a huge thanks to the many contributors for creating such an awesome free resource.

Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: Elastic Search, @HubSpot, WordNet, and @mongodb.

Please note that Reverse Dictionary uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. To learn more, see the privacy policy.

What does it feel like when someone really listens to you?

Good listeners are hard to find

Having someone’s full attention these days is rare. It’s so rare that when researcher Caroline Webb demonstrated to a group of business executives what she calls “extreme listening,” they said that the way she was listening felt to them like she was flirting with them. Other than flirting, they had no comparable experience of having someone really listen to them and take such an interest in what they had to say.[1]I wonder if you can recall a particular time in your life when you were in the company of a really good listener—someone who let you speak and who listened to you patiently with their full attention for as long as you needed to talk.

Maybe this listener was your spouse. Or maybe your listener was a close friend, a special teacher or mentor, a counsellor or psychotherapist, or a spiritual director. Maybe it was your mother or father, or a grandparent when you were a child.

What did that kind of listening feel like for you?

What feeling heard feels like

It feels good to be heard. Receiving listening helps us feel understood, validated, affirmed, valued, relieved, connected emotionally, and maybe even honored to have someone listen to so deeply.

Perhaps the attentive listening you received allowed you to think out loud about a particular challenge you were facing at the time, which helped you think more clearly and decisively about it.

What a gift!

In whatever way your listener affected you, I hope that you felt special and unique. That is the real power of listening. And once you have experienced it yourself, you can then help create those positive feelings in others.

Learning about listening from parents

As a child I remember how my mother would ask me questions to help me describe all the details in my day-to-day stories after I came home from school.

“What happened next?” she would ask. “You left the house this morning, went down the driveway, turned the corner, and then . . . ?”

And then I would tell her all about my day as she continued to ask me for more details.

Recalling this memory of how my mother listened to me helps me listen to my patients today.

One of my patients was an elderly man I came to know in my role as a palliative care chaplain. As he was telling me stories from his life a nurse tried to interrupt us. She was ready to do her morning care with my patient, but he wasn’t ready for her. He turned towards her and said, very graciously,

Excuse me nurse, I’m trying to tell my life story to this gentleman here, and he’s letting me tell it—the long way.

Body language

At home my father had an unusual habit of sitting at the kitchen table and eating with his eyes closed. In my family, we never knew for sure if he was paying attention to us and our dinnertime conversation or not because his eyes were closed. In this way, I learned from my father about the importance of eye contact and other forms of nonverbal communication when listening to others.

Research

In my research for my book How to Be an Even Better, I interviewed a sample of hospice volunteers to explore their experiences of when someone listened to them, both the good and the not so good experiences.

In turn, I wanted to learn more about how they draw on such formative experiences in order to listen to others in a healing way.

Sometimes nothing is more important than having someone really listen to you, especially for those facing the end of life in hospice and palliative care, and some listeners are better than others.

Please feel free to share your comments about your own formative experiences of listening.