Imagine what writing, reading, and speaking would be like if there were only one word for everything! Language would be boring, and would have no room for creativity. In fact, you could argue that poetry wouldn’t even exist without synonyms-one of the main reasons we use them is to be descriptive, creative, and expressive, and poetry relies on those three things. They have a huge, central role in word choice for both prose and poetry.

Synonyms make language more interesting, more meaningful, and more relevant. Since word choice is everything in language (probably the most crucial part!), the importance of synonyms is beyond measure. Words like “rapidly,” “gobbling,” “awful,” and “terrible” are much more descriptive than “quickly,” “eating,” and “bad”-they have the same meanings as Sentence 1, but stronger connotations. The youngster was speedily consuming a freezing ice cream cone, which gave him a terrible headache.Īs you can see, the three sentences above share the same situation, but, Sentences 2 and 3 paint a better picture because they use synonyms for some of the dull words in Sentence 1.The little kid was rapidly gobbling a frosty ice cream cone, which gave him an awful headache.The small child was quickly eating a cold ice cream cone, which gave him a bad headache.Easy: Simple, effortless, straightforward.Here are some synonyms of words you use every day: What’s more, synonyms are so important that there is a whole reference work dedicated to them, called a thesaurus-it’s a dictionary of synonyms! They come in all parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and so on.

The term synonym comes from a combination of the Ancient Greek syn, meaning with, and onoma, meaning “name.” Synonyms are regular and essential parts of everyday language that we use almost without thinking.

When words or phrases have the same meaning, we say that they are synonymous of each other. A synonym ( sin- uh-nim) is a word that has the same or nearly the same meaning as another word.

What is the meaning of synonyms