#UNDERSTAND SYNONYM MANUAL#

Thus the English word foreword was coined to replace the Romance preface. Many bound morphemes in English are borrowed from Latin and Greek and are synonyms for native words or morphemes: fish, pisci- (L), ichthy- (Gk).Īnother source of synonyms is coinages, which may be motivated by linguistic purism. Sometimes the Germanic term has become rare, or restricted to special meanings: tide, time/ temporal, chronic.

#UNDERSTAND SYNONYM MANUAL#

English often uses the Germanic term only as a noun, but has Latin and Greek adjectives: hand, manual (L), chiral (Gk) heat, thermal (L), caloric (Gk). In English, similarly, we often have Latin and Greek terms synonymous with Germanic ones: thought, notion (L), idea (Gk) ring, circle (L), cycle (Gk). As always with synonyms, there are nuances and shades of meaning or usage. In Ottoman Turkish, there were often three synonyms: water can be su (Turkish), âb (Persian), or mâ (Arabic): 'such a triad of synonyms exists in Ottoman for every meaning, without exception'. In Islamic cultures, Arabic and Persian are large sources of synonymous borrowings.įor example, in Turkish, kara and siyah both mean 'black', the former being a native Turkish word, and the latter being a borrowing from Persian. In East Asia, borrowings from Chinese in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese often double native terms.

Thus most European languages have borrowed from Latin and ancient Greek, especially for technical terms, but the native terms continue to be used in non-technical contexts. Loanwords are another rich source of synonyms, often from the language of the dominant culture of a region. For more examples, see the list of Germanic and Latinate equivalents in English. Thus, today we have synonyms like the Norman-derived people, liberty and archer, and the Saxon-derived folk, freedom and bowman. For example, in English, Norman French superstratum words and Old English substratum words continue to coexist. Synonyms are often some from the different strata making up a language. The word is borrowed from Latin synōnymum, in turn borrowed from Ancient Greek synōnymon ( συνώνυμον), composed of sýn ( σύν 'together, similar, alike') and -ōnym- ( -ωνυμ-), a form of onoma ( ὄνομα 'name'). It has applications in pedagogy and machine learning, because they rely on word-sense disambiguation. The analysis of synonymy, polysemy, hyponymy, and hypernymy is inherent to taxonomy and ontology in the information-science senses of those terms. Thus a metonym is a type of synonym, and the word metonym is a hyponym of the word synonym. executive branch under a specific president.

Metonymy can sometimes be a form of synonymy: the White House is used as a synonym of the administration in referring to the U.S. Synonyms are also a source of euphemisms. 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 (for example, a long arm is not the same as an extended arm). Some lexicographers claim that no synonyms have exactly the same meaning (in all contexts or social levels of language) because etymology, orthography, phonic qualities, connotations, ambiguous meanings, usage, and so on make them unique. The former are sometimes called cognitive synonyms and the latter, near-synonyms, plesionyms or poecilonyms. Synonyms with exactly the same meaning share a seme or denotational sememe, whereas those with inexactly similar meanings share a broader denotational or connotational sememe and thus overlap within a semantic field. Words are considered synonymous in only one particular sense: for example, long and extended in the context long time or extended time are synonymous, but long cannot be used in the phrase extended family. The standard test for synonymy is substitution: one form can be replaced by another in a sentence without changing its meaning.

For example, in the English language, the words begin, start, commence, and initiate are all synonyms of one another: they are synonymous. Synonym list in cuneiform on a clay tablet, Neo-Assyrian period Ī synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language.

Understand synonym