Another word for help, and which one to use

English has a dozen words for help and almost none of them are interchangeable. The right one depends on who is helping, how much, and whether it is legal.

The everyday words

• Assist — help with something another person is doing. The assistant is secondary.
• Aid — help given to someone in need, often organised: first aid, foreign aid, legal aid.
• Support — ongoing help that holds something up, practically or emotionally.
• Serve — help as a duty or a job.
• Back — support someone's position, usually publicly.

The ones with baggage

• Abet — help someone do wrong. Nearly always found in "aid and abet".
• Enable — neutral in technology, negative in relationships, where it means making someone's harmful habit easier.
• Succour — help in hardship. Formal, a little old-fashioned, and warmer than aid.

Asking for help

People underestimate how willing others are to help. Studies by Frank Flynn and Vanessa Lake found that people asking strangers for favours consistently guessed they would need to ask about twice as many people as they actually did.

What you could build here

Three directions that would work on this name. None of them is the only answer — it is your name once it is yours.

1. A focused thesaurus. One word, done properly, then the next. Long-tail synonym searches add up to real traffic.
2. A writing tool. Paste a sentence, get a better word for it, with the nuance explained.
3. A support directory. Read the name the other way: where to find help, sorted by what you need.

What it could look like

A sample concept, built to show the name in use. It is a starting point, not a business that exists.