Newbee Trying to organize a dictionary

Help
1

I’ve been keeping notes of interesting word pairs, catchphrases, jargon, and other forms of speech useful to writers. Anyone who’s trying to find the ‘right’ word. That’s frustrating. But, I have so many, and they’re use crosses over from one category to the next. Category? I’m not sure how to categorize any of this. There are thousands.

I hope that if I use Obsidian its inherent structuralism will reveal the perfect taxonomy. Wishful?

(thinking of Mortimore J. Adler, who wrote the index to the Encyclopedia Britannica)

I’ve gone through several elaborate systems of linking words and phrases and metaphors and so on, intra-category, but at some point, I realize they are too complicated and might make retrieval or searches more academic than practical.

Need help with general organization, not programming and setup. I don’t think I should set up anything in Obsidian until I know exactly how to structure my file system.

All help appreciated,
Ray Bright

2

I think trying to find the perfect category structure is a recipe for headaches and reworking.
Tags are great for being able to label information without being tied down to one spot, and links are great for understanding how things relate (and you can visualise links and tags in graph view).

In terms of folders, I pretty much just make a folder per month (eg “2023-11”) where I put all my notes, so that no one folder ends up with too many notes, and so I preserve a rough idea of when an idea occurred to me.

dataview and templater with yaml frontmatter also helps a great deal by allowing any kind of custom metadata to be added as and when needed.