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What is Another Word for Thesaurus?
March 25, 2009
That's right. You heard me.
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I am a word dork. Urban Dictionary offers “uninym” — when a word has only one meaning – and even cites thesaurus as the example! But “putcher” would be funnier to tell your kids…..
Technically there is no synonym for synonym. However “equivalent” comes close.
as opposed to when they engage in penis/vagina talk?
Lol – you are so totally on your own in this parenting spiral, sister! ;-}
“Synonym” isn’t in the thesaurus. But “synonymous” is. You could work that in somehow.
Looks like there are some possibilities:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070602063842AA3xWwa
That’s what happens when you try to educate your kids! They always one-up you.
It depends on the context that you use synonyms in. For example: You could be at an airport and a drunk guy could adopt you and the woman sitting next to you as his “children”, providing you both with new names AND having you terrified that he may have expired sitting next to you on the flight that the three of you share. In this case…drunken stranger is synonomous with Dad. Which is actually synonomous with my actual life.
Wow.
Comment therapy. Thank you.
Found your card in my laptop bag! The blogs are awesome!
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Note from Sarah: I met this guy on an airplane and this really happened to us. I can’t believe I never wrote about it.
I told anybody who would listen about that because it was one of those “You’ll never believe what happened to me in the airport” stories. You have to write about it! The world deserves to know! I can’t remember your name, I just remember my first one because I’m thinking to myself..”Do I look Spanish?!?!?!”
Then to top it off, as we helped “Pops” stumble aboard the flight…I never closed out my tab and my bank card is now a resident of Chicago.
Still activated too, with no unauthorized charges. I’m actually shopping on eBay RIGHT NOW.
I would like to point out that two words can be synonymous in the sense that they refer to the same physical entity, but when you consider connotation, context, levels of style, etc. I would argue that two words are very rarely synonymous. For example, there are several different ways you can refer to the state of being intoxicated, but your choice will depend on the specific context you are using those words in: drunk, hammered, trashed, inebriated. You would pick either one of those words because they help you convey some additional meaning that the other one doesn’t.
You could use it as an example of when a word doesn’t have an exact synonym. You could even use it as a history lesson:
The reason English has so many synonyms is because it’s a language that started out Germanic, but has been heavily influenced by French, Scandinavian languages, and Celtic languages because of all the various invasions of England throughout history; and Latin and Greek via ancient texts, church liturgy, law, and science.
So we have “big” (Scandinavian) and “large” (French); build (Old English) and construct (Latin); etc.
I think a synonym for synonym is gullible. No…wait…that’s the word that’s not in the dictionary.
The online Thesaurus has a couple suggestions: http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/synonym
(If you look up “thesaurus” in a Thesaurus, Douglas Hofstadter appears and talks to you for eight hours about strange loops.)
Can you send you kids to my class? Some of them still don’t get synonyms.
now i don’t feel so dorky. my sisters and i used to thumb through the dictionary and thesaurus and make each other guess the definition or an antonym or synonym.
Aw. The thought of the Goon Squad doing that makes me get all gushy.
Raoul’s comment really cracked me up.
Anyway, maybe metonym? Metonymn? I don’t know how you spell the word, but that’s the closest I can come to thinking of a synonym for synonym.
Other than that, I’d go with equivalent or similar.