Synonym

A synonym is a word with the same meaning as another word.^[1][2]

Examples

• sick and ill
• child and kid
• baby and infant
• rich and wealthy
• make and create^[3]
• student and pupil
• car and automobile
• scared and frightened

Nature

Synonyms can be nouns, verbs, adverbs or adjectives, but both words must be of the same part of speech. That means, only a noun can be a synonym of another noun, only a verb can be a synonym of another verb, and so on. One can find sets of synonyms in a thesaurus, which is a book listing groups of related words.

Some words are near-synonyms, which have similar but not exactly the same meaning. Examples of proper nouns, such as names of these languages, having synonyms or near-synonyms include:

• Siamese also known as Thai^[4]
• Ute also known as Noochew^[5]
• Urdu also known as Lashkari^[6]
• Ghurkhali also known as Nepali^[7]
• Euskara also known as Basque^[8]
• Myanmar also known as Burmese^[9]
• Persian also known as Farsi or Parsi^[10]

History

The word synonym dates back over 500 years, to late Middle English.^[1] The word is derived from Latin from the Greek word sunōnumon, neuter form of the adjective sunōnumos, from sun- meaning 'with' + onoma meaning 'name' in the Greek language.^[1] The meaning of the word has remained unchanged for all these centuries. There is even a saying, dating to 1892, Once a synonym, always a synonym.^[11] The word has been taught to generations of English-language students and is commonly known by the public. Many other languages have a similar word for synonym with the same or similar spelling.

Related pages

• Antonym
• Homonym
• Homophone