Thesaurus Synonyms Quotes

I almost miss the sound of your voice but know that the rain outside my window will suffice for tonight. I’m not drunk yet, but we haven’t spoken in months now and I wanted to tell you that someone threw a bouquet of roses in the trash bin on the corner of my street, and I wanted to cry because, because — well, you know exactly why. And, I guess I’m calling because only you understand how that would break my heart. I’m running out of things to say. My gas is running on empty. I’ve stopped stealing pages out of poetry books, but last week I pocketed a thesaurus and looked for synonyms for you but could only find rain and more rain and a thunderstorm that sounded like glass, like crystal, like an orchestra. I wanted to tell you that I’m not afraid of being moved anymore; Not afraid of this heart packing up its things and flying transcontinental with only a wool coat and a pocket with a folded-up address inside. I’ve saved up enough money to disappear. I know you never thought the day would come. Do you remember when we said goodbye and promised that it was only for then? It’s been years since I last saw you, years since we last have spoken. Sometimes, it gets quiet enough that I can hear the cicadas rubbing their thighs against each other’s. I’ve forgotten almost everything about you already, except that your skin was soft, like the belly of a peach, and how you would laugh, making fun of me for the way I pronounced almonds like I was falling in love with language.

I entered the word “crisis” into Thesaurus.com, it suggested “hot potato” as a synonym. I could not write this book without letting you know that Thesaurus.com lists “hot potato” as a synonym for “crisis.

I'm running out of things to say. I've stopped stealing pages out of poetry books, but last week I pocketed a thesaurus and looked for synonyms for you and could only find rain and more rain and a thunderstorm that sounded like glass, like crystal, an orchestra.

I tried to find a word for it in my thesaurus, but there isn't one. At least, not one that doesn't belittle the plight of POWs and victims of famine. I guess we can just call it beyond suck. -Lulu Dark

Last week I pocketed a thesaurus and looked for synonyms for you but could only find rain and more rain and a thunderstorm that sounded like glass, like crystal, like an orchestra.

Thesaurus [10w] There's no synonym for thesaurus ~ the closest one is hashtags.

English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget’s Thesaurus. “Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books exist” [The Miracle of Language, page 54].

She grinned. “This is the fun part.” She didn’t even look, but a moment before the demon hit, massive wings snapped out of her back with lightning speed and a thundercrack, smacking the demon and flicking it over the rooftops like it was a…gnat. Okay, so the thesaurus in my head wasn’t cranking out the synonyms because I was too busy gawking at the enormous white wings checkered with several feathers the same brilliant blue as her hair and shirt. They fluttered with a whispering grace, sending a soft breeze to cool my sweaty skin. I blinked when she snapped her fingers in my face. “Did you hear anything I just said?” “You have wings?” She sighed. Her shoulders and wings slumped. “I need you to focus, dear, so listen up. You must stick close to the Hex Boys. They’ll protect you whilst—“ “Where did the wings come from?

Yet, when I’m alone, I rarely feel lonely. If I were writing the thesaurus entries for alone, the synonyms would include: authentic, free, individual, indulgent, open, peaceful, protected, pure, quiet, rejuvenating, solitary. Thanks to the amount of time I spend alone, I’m on intimate terms with myself. I have a running internal dialogue that informs my life, my writing, my relationships. I observe and absorb the world around me. I’m good at being alone.

It is often said that what most immediately sets English apart from other languages is the richness of its vocabulary. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and the revised Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000, but that is only part of the total. Technical and scientific terms would add millions more. Altogether, about 200,000 English words are in common use, more than in German (184,000) and far more than in French (a mere 100,000). The richness of the English vocabulary, and the wealth of available synonyms, means that English speakers can often draw shades of distinction unavailable to non-English speakers. The French, for instance, cannot distinguish between house and home, between mind and brain, between man and gentleman, between “I wrote” and “I have written.” The Spanish cannot differentiate a chairman from a president, and the Italians have no equivalent of wishful thinking. In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care [all cited in The New York Times, June 18, 1989]. English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget’s Thesaurus. “Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books exist” [The Miracle of Language, page 54]. On the other hand, other languages have facilities we lack. Both French and German can distinguish between knowledge that results from recognition (respectively connaître and kennen) and knowledge that results from understanding (savoir and wissen). Portuguese has words that differentiate between an interior angle and an exterior one. All the Romance languages can distinguish between something that leaks into and something that leaks out of. The Italians even have a word for the mark left on a table by a moist glass (culacino) while the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey. (Wouldn’t they just?) It’s sgriob. And we have nothing in English to match the Danish hygge (meaning “instantly satisfying and cozy”), the French sang-froid, the Russian glasnost, or the Spanish macho, so we must borrow the term from them or do without the sentiment. At the same time, some languages have words that we may be pleased to do without. The existence in German of a word like schadenfreude (taking delight in the misfortune of others) perhaps tells us as much about Teutonic sensitivity as it does about their neologistic versatility. Much the same could be said about the curious and monumentally unpronounceable Highland Scottish word sgiomlaireachd, which means “the habit of dropping in at mealtimes.” That surely conveys a world of information about the hazards of Highland life—not to mention the hazards of Highland orthography. Of

It is now time to face the fact that English is a crazy language — the most loopy and wiggy of all tongues. In what other language do people drive in a parkway and park in a driveway? In what other language do people play at a recital and recite at a play? Why does night fall but never break and day break but never fall? Why is it that when we transport something by car, it’s called a shipment, but when we transport something by ship, it’s called cargo? Why does a man get a hernia and a woman a hysterectomy? Why do we pack suits in a garment bag and garments in a suitcase? Why do privates eat in the general mess and generals eat in the private mess? Why do we call it newsprint when it contains no printing but when we put print on it, we call it a newspaper? Why are people who ride motorcycles called bikers and people who ride bikes called cyclists? Why — in our crazy language — can your nose run and your feet smell?Language is like the air we breathe. It’s invisible, inescapable, indispensable, and we take it for granted. But, when we take the time to step back and listen to the sounds that escape from the holes in people’s faces and to explore the paradoxes and vagaries of English, we find that hot dogs can be cold, darkrooms can be lit, homework can be done in school, nightmares can take place in broad daylight while morning sickness and daydreaming can take place at night, tomboys are girls and midwives can be men, hours — especially happy hours and rush hours — often last longer than sixty minutes, quicksand works very slowly, boxing rings are square, silverware and glasses can be made of plastic and tablecloths of paper, most telephones are dialed by being punched (or pushed?), and most bathrooms don’t have any baths in them. In fact, a dog can go to the bathroom under a tree —no bath, no room; it’s still going to the bathroom. And doesn’t it seem a little bizarre that we go to the bathroom in order to go to the bathroom? Why is it that a woman can man a station but a man can’t woman one, that a man can father a movement but a woman can’t mother one, and that a king rules a kingdom but a queen doesn’t rule a queendom? How did all those Renaissance men reproduce when there don’t seem to have been any Renaissance women? Sometimes you have to believe that all English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane: In what other language do they call the third hand on the clock the second hand? Why do they call them apartments when they’re all together? Why do we call them buildings, when they’re already built? Why it is called a TV set when you get only one? Why is phonetic not spelled phonetically? Why is it so hard to remember how to spell mnemonic? Why doesn’t onomatopoeia sound like what it is? Why is the word abbreviation so long? Why is diminutive so undiminutive? Why does the word monosyllabic consist of five syllables? Why is there no synonym for synonym or thesaurus? And why, pray tell, does lisp have an s in it? If adults commit adultery, do infants commit infantry? If olive oil is made from olives, what do they make baby oil from? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian consume? If pro and con are opposites, is congress the opposite of progress? ...

It is understandable how this shame came into being. The nation made the black man's color a stigma. Even linguistics and semantics conspire to give this impression. If you look in Roget's Thesaurus you will find about 120 synonyms for blacK, and right down the line you will find words like smut, something dirty, worthless, and useless, and then you look further and you find about 120 synonyms for white and they all represent something high, noble, pure, chaste - right down the line. In our language structure, a white lie is a little better than a black lie. Somebody goes wrong in the family and we don't call him a white sheep, we call him a black sheep. We don't say whitemail, but blackmail. We don't speak of white-balling somebody, but black-balling somebody. The word 'black' itself in our society connotes something that is degrading. It was absolutely necessary to come to a moment with a sense of dignity. It is very positive and very necessary.

There is no natural safeguard in the English language against the faults of haste, distraction, timidity, dividedness of mind, modesty. English does not run on its own rails, like French, with a simply managed mechanism of knobs and levers, so that any army officer or provincial mayor can always, at a minute’s notice, glide into a graceful speech in celebration of any local or national event, however unexpected. The fact is that English has altogether too many resources for the ordinary person, and nobody holds it against him if he speaks or writes badly. The only English dictionary with any pretension to completeness as a collection of literary precedents, the Oxford English Dictionary, is of the size and price of an encyclopedia; and pocket-dictionaries do not distinguish sufficiently between shades of meaning in closely associated words: for example, between the adjectives ‘silvery’, ‘silvern’, ‘silver’, ‘silvered’, ‘argent’, ‘argentine’, ‘argentic’, ‘argentous’. Just as all practising lawyers have ready access to a complete legal library, so all professional writers (and every other writer who can afford it) should possess or have ready access to the big Oxford English Dictionary. But how many trouble about the real meanings of words? Most of them are content to rub along with a Thesaurus—which lumps words together in groups of so-called synonyms, without definitions—and an octavo dictionary. One would not expect a barrister to prepare a complicated insurance or testamentary case with only Everyman’s Handy Guide to the Law to help him; and there are very few books which one can write decently without consulting at every few pages a dictionary of at least two quarto volumes—Webster’s, or the shorter Oxford English Dictionary—to make sure of a word’s antecedents and meaning.

Generations of British writers would look up to Roget as a kindred soul who could offer both emotional as well as intellectual sustenance. In the stage directions to Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie includes an homage to Roget: The night nursery of the Darling family, which is the scene of our opening Act, is at the top of a rather depressed street in Bloomsbury. We might have a right to place it where we will, and the reason Bloomsbury is chosen is that Mr. Roget once lived there. So did we in the days when his Thesaurus was our only companion in London; and we whom he has helped to wend our way through life have always wanted to pay him a little compliment. For Barrie, Roget's masterpiece was synonymous with virtue itself. To describe the one saving grace of the play's villain, Captain Hook, Barrie adds, "The man is not wholly evil--he has a Thesaurus in his cabin.

chiaroscuro

opprobrious (uh-PRO-bree-us). Abusive; disrespectful. Martha was caught off guard by her friend’s sudden OPPROBRIOUS attack on her behavior of the previous night.

scurrilous (SKUR-ih-luss). Offensive to civilized discourse; verbally abusive; vulgar; coarse; slanderous. Because they were made on the floor

A

Oh, how he hated that werewolf. Despised him. Loathed him. Abhorred him. He could take every synonym in the thesaurus, plus all of their foreign language equivalents, including dead languages that only a couple of scholars in the world still knew how to translate, and it wouldn’t come close to expressing just how deeply he hated that man-beast.

Practice: Explore Connotations Pick a word from your thesaurus and write down some of its synonyms, looking them up in a dictionary if you need to. Pick one synonym that has positive connotations (such as svelte) and one that has negative connotations (such as stringy) and write a sentence using each one. Do this exercise again with a different word. Read your sentences out loud, noticing the different effects of the words you’ve chosen. Do the particular connotations of your chosen word influence how you write the rest of the sentence? Practice: Explore Connotations Read your favorite writer, keeping an ear open for words chosen for positive or negative connotations. Collect these words in your notebook and experiment with making your own sentences with them. Practice: Explore Connotations Read over a passage from your own work, keeping your ear tuned to the connotations of your words. Are there any places where you might choose a different word, exploiting its connotations to enhance the effect of your sentence? Practice: Explore Connotations Some words have both positive and negative connotations. We can work with the connotations of this kind of word in another way as well—by placing it in a context that highlights one particular connotation. Take the word fire (as a noun) for instance; its most familiar denotations are “things that are burning” and “flames produced by things that are burning.” But the noun fire also has connotations. Take a few minutes now, if you like, to bring the denotations of the noun fire to your mind, and then listen for the words or phrases, the ideas or things, that this word suggests to you; write them all down. You may find yourself collecting synonyms for the word. If this happens, try to let your mind move beyond close synonyms and see what other ideas or things the word brings to your mind. You have now collected some of the word’s connotations. Now look through these connotations. What do you notice? One thing you might notice is

Practice: Explore Denotation Take a few minutes to unpack your word hoard, then read the words slowly, out loud. Listen as if you were encountering these words for the first time. Mark any words that you feel curious about, that spark the question What does that word mean? The words you mark don’t have to be words you’ve never used. Sometimes it’s fun to pick a familiar word and look it up. Now select one or more of the words you marked. Look up their meanings in the dictionary. What do you notice? Is this what you thought these words meant? If you own a second dictionary, look up some of your words in that one, too. Are there any differences in the definitions? If you like, write down the definitions in your notebook. Now, with the dictionary meanings of your words in mind, experiment with using some of these words in sentences. What do you notice? Try reading your sentences out loud. You can also make words your own by using them in conversation. Practice: At Play in the Dictionary Take some time to browse the pages of your dictionary. When a word catches your attention, write it down in your notebook, along with its definition(s). Now use the word in a sentence. What do you notice in doing this practice? Practice: Verify the Meanings of Words As you read, take note of words you like whose meanings elude you. Look up those words in a dictionary, then make sentences with them. Practice: At Play in a Thesaurus English, someone once wrote, is the only language that needs a thesaurus. That's because English has so many synonyms. To spend some time browsing in a thesaurus is to be amazed by the wealth of words in English—more words than any writer, no matter how prolific, could ever use in a lifetime. Like a dictionary, a thesaurus is a wonderful playground for writers who want to exercise their word minds and build their word hoards. Give yourself some time, when you can, to simply flip the pages of a thesaurus and browse its entries. Take note of the words you like; collect them into your notebook, if you wish. Try using them in sentences.

Sometimes the best way to relax, unwind, and get everything straightened out... is to curl up with a good book. – Douglas Pagels, from 100 Things to Always Remember and One Thing to Never Forget Give something of yourself to the day... even if it’s just a smile to someone walking the other way. – Douglas Pagels, from 100 Things to Always Remember and One Thing to Never Forget Even if you can’t just snap your fingers and make a dream come true, you can travel in the direction of your dream, every single day, and you can keep shortening the distance between the two of you. – Douglas Pagels, from 100 Things to Always Remember and One Thing to Never Forget Rest assured that, whenever you need them, your guardian angels are great about working overtime. – Douglas Pagels, from A Special Christmas Blessing Just for You Never forget what a treasure you are. That special person in the mirror may not always get to hear all the compliments you so sweetly deserve, but you are so worthy of such an abundance... of friendship, joy, and love. – Douglas Pagels, from You Are One Amazing Lady I love that I get to wake up every morning in a world that has people like you in it. – Douglas Pagels, from You Are One Amazing Lady Be someone who doesn’t make your guardian angel work too hard or worry too much. – Douglas Pagels, from Wishing You a Happy, Successful, Incredible Life! Each day is a blank page in the diary of your life. Every day, you’re given a chance to determine what the words will say and how the story will unfold. The more rewarding you can make each page, the more amazing the entire book will be. And I would love for you to write a masterpiece. – Douglas Pagels, from Wishing You a Happy, Successful, Incredible Life! Practice your tree pose. I want you to have a goal of finding a way to bring everything in your life into balance. Let the roots of all your dreams go deep. Let the hopes of all your tomorrows grow high. Bend, but don’t break. Take the seasons as they come. Stick up for yourself. And reach for the sky. – Douglas Pagels, from Wishing You a Happy, Successful, Incredible Life! Remember that a new morning is good medicine... and one of the joys of life is realizing that you have the ability to make this a really great day. – Douglas Pagels, from Wishing You a Happy, Successful, Incredible Life! Find comfort in knowing that “rising above” is something you can always find a way to do. – Douglas Pagels, from Wishing You a Happy, Successful, Incredible Life! Look up “onward” in the thesaurus and utilize every one of those synonyms whenever you’re wondering which direction to go in. – Douglas Pagels, from Wishing You a Happy, Successful, Incredible Life! Don’t judge yourself – love yourself. – Douglas Pagels, from Wishing You a Happy, Successful, Incredible Life! If you have a choice between a la-di-da life and an ooh-la-la! one, well... you know what to do. Choose the one that requires you to dust off your dancing shoes. – Douglas Pagels, from Wishing You a Happy, Successful, Incredible Life! Write out your own definition of success. Fill it with a mix of stardust and wishes and down-to-earth things, and provide all the insight you can give it. Imagine what it takes to have a really happy, rewarding life. And then go out... and live it. – Douglas Pagels, from Wishing You a Happy, Successful, Incredible Life!

I was struck by the way so many of our fee clients combed the thesaurus for synonyms for “said,” and compounded the felony by tacking on an adverbial modifier. It weakened their dialogue considerably.

But here in the contemporary West, we don’t really do elders: instead, we have “the elderly.” The connotations are quite different. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary online, “elderly” is nothing more than “a polite word for ‘old.’” The online Merriam-Webster Dictionary informs us that “elderly” can also mean “old-fashioned.” In Lexico, the Oxford online thesaurus, the word is associated with synonyms such as “doddering,” “decrepit,” “in one’s dotage,” “past one’s prime,” “past it,” and “over the hill.” It doesn’t paint a pretty picture; these are not exactly the adjectives that most aging women would aspire to embody. But the aging woman has had a particularly troubled history in Western culture. The last convictions might have taken place in the eighteenth century, but in many ways we still haven’t quite recovered from our demonization in the witch trials. Older women, when they’re not rendered completely invisible, are still trivialized and marginalized, and often actively ridiculed. “Little old ladies,” we call them here in Britain; “old bats” (if we think they’re crazy), or “old bags” and “old trouts” (if they don’t live up to our expectations that old women should rarely be seen, and certainly should never be heard).

Sorry, I needed another word for "crisis," and when I entered the word "crisis" into Thesaurus.com, it suggested "hot potato" as a synonym. I could not write this book without letting you know but Thesaurus.com lists "hot potato" as a synonym for "crisis." "Hey, did you hear about what's happening with Israel and Palestine? It's becoming a real hot potato.

Ontologies are not just another type of controlled vocabulary. Although they are similar to thesauri in that they address relationships among concepts, there are significant differences. The most notable is that the purpose of an ontology is farther reaching than that of a controlled vocabulary. A thesaurus, most often, is focused on addressing synonyms, homographs, hierarchy, and so on. Although an ontology is a formalized vocabulary of terms, an ontology’s emphasis is not solely lexical; it is also an attempt to represent the reality or essence of a situation, knowledge domain, or conceptual framework through formal definitions and specific relationships (i.e., those going beyond simple hierarchy and synonymy).

Here is how you put this rule into action: use a thesaurus to find a synonym for a word you use too much. Then, simply swap the word for an interesting synonym. Let’s try it on the sentences above: “that painting is magnificent”, “your daughter is gorgeous”, “London is a truly stunning city”, “you have amazingly charming eyes”.