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dated: no longer used by the majority of English speakers, but still
encountered occasionally, especially among the older generation,
e.g.
measure one’s length
as a synonym for
fall down
.
historical: still used today, but only to refer to some practice or article that is no
longer part of the modern world, e.g.
ruff
, the type of collar.
humorous: used with the intention of sounding funny or playful, e.g.
terminologi-
cal inexactitude
as a synonym for
lie
.
archaic:very old-fashioned language, not in ordinary use at all today, but
sometimes used to give a deliberately old-fashioned effect, or found
in works of the past that are still widely read, e.g.
aliment
as a
synonym for
food
.
rare: not in common use, e.g.
acclivitous
as a synonym for
steep
.
World English
It is a truism that English is now a world language. In this thesaurus, particular care
has been taken to include synonyms from every variety of English, not just British;
and when these are exclusively or very strongly associated with a region of the
world they are labelled as such.
The main regional standards are British (abbreviated to <Brit.>), North American <N.
Amer.>, Australian and New Zealand <Austral./NZ>, South African <S. African>,
Indian (in the sense of the variety of English found throughout the subcontinent),
and West Indian <W. Indian>. If the distinction is very clear, finer
labelling may be
used, as with
beer parlour
, a Canadian synonym for
bar
.
Scottish, Irish, and Northern English are varieties within the British Isles containing
distinctive vocabulary items of their own. The main synonyms found as regional
terms of this kind are entered and labelled accordingly.
The term for something found mainly or exclusively in a particular country or region
(although it may be mentioned in any variety of English) is identified by an
indication such as ‘(
in the Caribbean
)’. An example is
key
(as a synonym for
island
).
Many regionally restricted terms are informal, rather than being part of the standard
language. Writers in the northern hemisphere in search of local colour may be
delighted to learn that an Australian synonym for
sordid
is
scungy
, while Australian
writers may find it equally useful to be given equivalent British terms,
manky
and
grotty
.
Words that are used in English but still generally regarded is foreign are labelled
with their language of origin. For example, among the synonyms for
hotel
are:
French
pension, auberge;
Spanish
posada, parador;
Portuguese
pousada;
Italian
pensione;
German
Gasthaus.
Opposites
Many synonym sets are followed by one or more words that have the opposite
meaning from the headword, often called ‘antonyms’. There are several different
kinds of opposite.
Tr ue
and
false
are absolute opposites, with no middle ground.
Logically, a statement is either true or false: it cannot be slightly true or rather false.
Hot
and
cold
, on the other hand, are opposites with gradations of meaning: it
makes perfectly good sense to say that something is rather hot or very cold, and
there are a number of words (
warm
,
tepid
,
cool
) which represent intermediate
stages. It makes sense to ask about something “How hot is it?” but that commits the
speaker to the notion that it is hot at least to some extent. So
hot
and
cold
are at
opposite ends of a continuum, rather than being absolutes.
For many words, such as
senile
, there is no single word that serves as an opposite,
but the phrase
in the prime of life
does the job. In this title the broadest possible
definition has been adopted, giving the maximum amount of information to the user.
In some cases, a phrasal opposite is given for a phrasal subentry, e.g.
bottle things
up
as an opposite for
let off steam
.
The antonyms given in this thesaurus are not the only possible opposites, but they
are usually the furthest in meaning from the headword. By looking up the ‘opposite’
word as an entry in its own right, the user will generally find a much larger range of
opposites to choose from. For example, the entry for
delete
includes:
-OPPOSITE(S) add, insert.
Both
add
and
insert
are entries in their own right and give synonyms such as
include
,
append
, and
interpolate
.
Word links
The ‘Word Links’ sections at the end of certain entries supply words which are not