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A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. For example, in the English language, the words begin, start, commence, and initiate are all synonyms of one another: they are synonymous. The standard test for synonymy is substitution: one form can be replaced by another in a sentence without changing its meaning.
Words may often be synonymous in only one particular word sense: for example, long and extended in the context long time or extended time are synonymous, but long cannot be used in the phrase extended family.
Synonyms with exactly the same meaning share a seme or denotational sememe, whereas those with inexactly similar meanings share a broader denotational or sememe and thus overlap within a semantic field. The former are sometimes called cognitive synonyms and the latter, near-synonyms, plesionymsDiMarco, Chrysanne, and Graeme Hirst. "Usage notes as the basis for a representation of near-synonymy for lexical choice." Proceedings of 9th annual conference of the University of Waterloo Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary and Text Research. 1993. or poecilonyms.Grambs, David. The Endangered English Dictionary: Bodacious Words Your Dictionary Forgot. WW Norton & Company, 1997.
Metonymy can sometimes be a form of synonymy: the White House is used as a synonym of the administration in referring to the U.S. executive branch under a specific president. Thus, a metonym is a type of synonym, and the word metonym is a hyponym of the word synonym.
The analysis of synonymy, polysemy, hyponymy, and hypernymy is inherent to taxonomy and ontology in the information science senses of those terms.Hirst, Graeme. "ftp://ftp.db.toronto.edu/public_html/dist/gh/Hirst-Ontol-2009-as-published.pdf." Handbook on ontologies. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009. 269-292. It has applications in pedagogy and machine learning, because they rely on word-sense disambiguation.Peter D. Turney (2024). 9781905593446, Association for Computational Linguistics. . ISBN 9781905593446
are another rich source of synonyms, often from the language of the dominant culture of a region. Thus, most European languages have borrowed from Latin and ancient Greek, especially for technical terms, but the native terms continue to be used in non-technical contexts. In East Asia, borrowings from Chinese language in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese often double native terms. In Islamic cultures, Arabic and Persian language are large sources of synonymous borrowings.
For example, in Turkish language, kara and siyah both mean 'black', the former being a native Turkish word, and the latter being a borrowing from Persian. In Ottoman Turkish, there were often three synonyms: water can be su (Turkish), âb (Persian), or mâ (Arabic): "such a triad of synonyms exists in Ottoman for every meaning, without exception". As always with synonyms, there are nuances and shades of meaning or usage.Ziya Gökalp, The Principles of Turkism, 1968, p. 78
In English, similarly, there often exist Latin (L) and Greek (Gk) terms synonymous with Germanic ones: thought, notion (L), idea (Gk); ring, circle (L), cycle (Gk). English often uses the Germanic term only as a noun, but has Latin and Greek adjectives: hand, manual (L), chiral (Gk); heat, thermal (L), caloric (Gk). Sometimes the Germanic term has become rare, or restricted to special meanings: tide, time/ temporal, chronic.Carl Darling Buck, A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages, 1949, reprinted as
Many bound morphemes in English are borrowed from Latin and Greek and are synonyms for native words or morphemes: fish, pisci- (L), ichthy- (Gk).
Another source of synonyms is neologism, which may be motivated by linguistic purism. Thus, the English word foreword was coined to replace the Romance preface. In Turkish, okul was coined to replace the Arabic-derived mektep and mederese, but those words continue to be used in some contexts.Geoffrey Lewis, The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success, 1999, , p. 44, 70, 117
Various technical domains may employ synonyms to convey precise technical nuances.
Some writers avoid repeating the same word in close proximity, and prefer to use synonyms: this is called elegant variation. Many modern style guides criticize this.
Synonyms are defined with respect to certain senses of words: pupil as the aperture in the iris of the eye is not synonymous with student. Similarly, he expired means the same as he died, yet my passport has expired cannot be replaced by my passport has died.
A thesaurus lists similar or related words; these are often, but not always, synonyms.
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