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historical: still used today, but only to refer to some practice or article that is
no longer part of the modern world, e.g.
crinoline
as a synonym for
petticoat
.
humorous: used with the intention of sounding funny or playful, e.g.
termino-
logical 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 an oft-repeated 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>). Only if the distinction is very clear is
any finer labelling 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 listed here and labelled accordingly.
The term for something found mainly or only in a particular country or region
(although it may be mentioned in any variety of English) is identified by an
indication such as '<<in France>>'. An example is
gîte
(as a synonym for
cottage
).
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 the equivalent terms in Britain,
manky
and
grotty
.
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 antonym.
True
and
false
are absolute antonyms, with no middle ground.
Logically, a statement is either true or false, but cannot be slightly true or rather
false.
Hot
and
cold
, on the other hand, are antonyms 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, there is no single word that counts as an antonym, but there may
be a phrase that gets the opposite meaning across. For example, what is the
opposite of
senile
? There is no exact antonym, but the phrase
in the prime of life
gets the opposite meaning across. In this title the broadest possible definition has
been adopted, giving the maximum amount of information to the user. In some
cases, a phrasal antonym is given for a phrasal subentry, e.g.
bottle things up
as an
antonym 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
antonyms to choose from. For example, at the entry for
delete
the user will find:
-OPPOSITE(S) add, insert.
Both
add
and
insert are
entries in their own right.