Help

Spruce is a search engine for finding inspiring sentences. Tell Spruce about something you've read or written and it will find quotations or lyrics that are related to the subject matter, sometimes in surprising and subtle ways. Spruce gives you a diverse set of perspectives on your text that you can cite in your work or use to generate new ideas for your project. Your query can be as short as a single word, or as long as a whole document. The more you tell Spruce, the more relevant the results will be.

You can test out Spruce from this web page — hit the question mark icon to go back to the search box. If Spruce looks useful to you, install the Chrome extension to make it easier to access in the future.

Extension menu

To start using Spruce, open up the popup from the extensions bar in the top right of your chrome browser. You may have to click on the little puzzle piece to find Spruce. Pin us to make finding quotes easier! Then, just start writing. When you're done, click "Find Quotes!" or hit command-Enter, and we'll do the rest.

The leftmost column of every result reveals a ≡ symbol, which you can click on to find options to copy the quote to your clipboard or explore similar quotes. Before citing a quote in your document, be sure to search (using the link under the "Source" column) to verify that it's accurately attributed and to get more context about the quote from the Web.

Context menu

Writing something that you want quotes for? Curious what the world has to say about some topic? Skip the copy + paste and use the context menu! All you have to do is highlight your text, right click it, then pick "Spruce up your selection!"

(Note: the right-click access will not work when you're in Google Docs. We offer a separate Google Docs add-on that has similar quote-finding features as Spruce.)

Jokes

A jokes option is available which can help you find snappy one-liners related to your text. Most of the jokes are "clean" and we've tried to remove jokes that are hurtful to people, but some offensive jokes may have slipped through the cracks. With this caveat in mind, if you'd like to give the jokes option a try, toggle the switch below, and the option will appear when you go back to the main page.

About

Spruce is a free experimental service from Datamuse, and was created by Jonah Fried and Doug Beeferman.

How it works: Behind the scenes, Spruce cuts your selection into sentences and then scans a database of quotes looking for evidence of a connection to each sentence, using sentence embeddings to measure the strength of each connection. The quotes with the most evidence are listed first by default. The quotes come from the Web via the Common Crawl and WikiQuote.

Please note that while we've tried to curate a set of diverse and interesting quotes, you may occasionally find perspectives that are bigoted or hurtful. If you find something that strikes you as hate speech, please let us know via the feedback link below and we'll remove it.

We'd love to hear your feedback on this tool and get your thoughts on other brainstorming tools that may be useful to you. Please fill out this feedback form if you have two minutes free!