synonym

Information about synonym

For the taxonomical term, see .


Synonyms (in ancient Greek, συν ("syn") = plus and όνομα ("onoma") = name) are different words with identical or at least similar meanings. Words that are synonyms are said to be synonymous, and the state of being a synonym is called synonymy.

An example of synonyms are the words car and automobile. Similarly, if we talk about a long time or an extended time, long and extended become synonyms. In the figurative sense, two words are often said to be synonymous if they have the same connotation:

"a widespread impression that … Hollywood was synonymous with immorality" (Doris Kearns Goodwin)


Synonyms can be any part of speech (e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs or prepositions), as long as both members of the pair are the same part of speech. More examples of English synonyms are:
  • baby and infant (noun)
  • student and pupil (noun)
  • buy and purchase (verb)
  • pretty and attractive (adjective)
  • sick and ill (adjective)
  • quickly and speedily (adverb)
  • on and upon (preposition)
  • freedom and liberty
Note that the synonyms are defined with respect to certain senses of words; for instance, pupil as the "aperture in the iris of the eye" is not synonymous with student. Similarly, expired as "having lost validity" (as in grocery goods) doesn't necessarily mean death.

In English many synonyms evolved from a mixture of Norman French and English words, often with some words associated with the Saxon countryside ("folk", "freedom") and synonyms with the Norman nobility ("people", "liberty").

Some lexicographers claim that no synonyms have exactly the same meaning (in all contexts or social levels of language) because etymology, orthography, phonic qualities, ambiguous meanings, usage, etc. make them unique. However, many people feel that the synonyms they use are identical in meaning for all practical purposes, and are interchangeable. Different words that are similar in meaning usually differ for a reason: feline is more formal than cat; long and extended are only synonyms in one usage and not in others, such as a long arm and an extended arm. Synonyms are also a source of euphemisms.

The purpose of a thesaurus is to offer the user a listing of similar or related words; these are often, but not always, synonyms.

Related terms

Antonyms are words with opposite or nearly opposite meanings. For example:
  • dead and alive (compare to synonyms: dead and deceased)
  • near and far (compare to synonyms: near and close)
  • war and peace (compare to synonyms: war and armed conflict)
The words synonym and antonym are themselves antonyms.

Hypernyms and hyponyms are words that refer to, respectively, a general category and a specific instance of that category. For example, vehicle is a hypernym of car, and car is a hyponym of vehicle.

See also

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In grammar, a lexical category (also word class, lexical class, or in traditional grammar part of speech) is a linguistic category of words (or more precisely lexical items
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Examples
A proper or common noun can co-occur with an article or an attributive adjective. Verbs and adjectives can't. As usual, a `*' in front of an example means that this example is ungrammatical.
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verb is a word belonging to the part of speech that usually denotes an action (bring, read), an occurrence (decompose, glitter), or a state of being (exist, stand).
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    In grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a noun or pronoun (called the adjective's subject), giving more information about what the noun or pronoun refers to.
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    adverb is a part of speech. It is any word that modifies any other part of language: verbs, adjectives (including numbers), clauses, sentences and other adverbs, except for nouns; modifiers of nouns are primarily determiners and adjectives.
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    In grammar, a preposition is a part of speech that introduces a prepositional phrase. For example, in the sentence "The cat sleeps on the sofa", the word "on" is a preposition, introducing the prepositional phrase "on the sofa".
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    A lexicographer is a person devoted to the study of lexicography, especially an author of a dictionary.

    Samuel Johnson, himself a lexicographer, defined a lexicographer as "a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing
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    Etymology is the study of the history of words - when they entered a language, from what source, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.

    In languages with a long written history, etymology makes use of philology, the study of how words change from culture to
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    The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. (Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example for Kurdish, there can be more than one orthography.
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    Phonic may refer to:
    • A synonym of phonetic, adjective pertaining to sounds or speech
    • Phonic Corporation, a U.S. professional audio equipment manufacturer

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    Thesaurus is derived from 16th century New Latin, in turn from Latin thesaurus, from ancient Greek θησαυρός thesauros, "store-house", "treasury".
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    Antonyms, from the Greek anti ("opposite") and onoma ("name") are word pairs that are opposite in meaning, such as hot and cold, obese and skinny, and up and down.
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    A word A is a hypernym (in Greek υπερνύμιον, literally meaning 'extra name') of another word B if A's meaning encompasses the meaning of B, that is, if B is a kind of A.
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    In linguistics, a hyponym is a word or phrase whose semantic range is included within that of another word. For example, scarlet, vermilion, carmine, and crimson are all hyponyms of red (their hypernym).
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    acronym: a word formed from the initials of one or more words that is pronounceable like a normal word, such as NATO, sometimes in distinction to initialism
  • allonym: an author's name of another person's, often a well-known person's name
  • anacronym
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    • In metadata a Synonym ring or synset, is a group of data elements that are considered semantically equivalent for the purposes of information retrieval. These data elements are frequently found in different metadata registries.
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