Language is the original technology, the tool we've all used to coordinate with each other for thousands of years. Our success in life -- both professionally and in relationships -- depends on it.

Most Read from Fast Company

I write for a living, so you'd think I'd have language down. I don't. I constantly find myself knowing a word exists but not being able to think of it. What am I supposed to do?

You might, in some circumstances, be able to use a thesaurus for this -- just look up a word that means the same thing as the word you're trying to think of. But what if you can't even think of a similar word?

The next time you're in a sticky situation where you know a word exists but can't quite remember what it is, check out a site called Reverse Dictionary.

➜ Reverse Dictionary lets you provide a phrase describing a word and then get back a list of possible matches.

⌚ It'll take you less than 10 seconds to start using.

I've been playing with it for a couple of days, and I'm really impressed with how well it works. If I type "overly willing to please," for instance, I get back "obsequious" -- which was the exact word I was trying to think of.

And you can get even more specific than that. Trying to remember how the fictional detective would respond to true statements, I typed "how Sherlock Holmes would say indeed." The result: "indubitably."

I asked about "dystopian to an absurd extent" and got both "Orwellian" and "Kafkaesque" as answers.

You get the idea: Just type a phrase and find the word you're looking for. This is obviously useful for writing, where finding the right word can take a sentence from good to great. But I've also found it a fun way to explore language.

Perhaps you've heard about how, in German, there's seemingly a word for everything. English has a lot of words, too -- there are over 1 billion words in English, in fact, and I'm willing to bet you don't know most of them. If you think of an idea, there's a decent chance a word for it exists, whether you know it or not. The Reverse Dictionary is a great way to discover these hidden gems.